Parents' Guide to

Kevin Can F--k Himself

By Joyce Slaton, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 15+

Language and sudden, bloody violence in satirical drama.

TV AMC Drama 2021
Kevin Can F--k Himself Poster Image

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What you will—and won't—find in this TV show.

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What's the Story?

Allison (Annie Murphy) lives a blue-collar life in a blue-collar town with her blue-collar husband, Kevin (Eric Petersen), who inhabits a charmed existence as a beloved and bellicose fella. Kevin loves the Patriots, spends all his time with his best buddy and neighbor Neil (Alex Bonifer) and his sister Patty (Mary Hollis Inboden), and views Allison as something between a wife-bot and a buzzkill. Allison has big plans -- she wants to make a new and better life -- but when she realizes Kevin's standing in her way, she suddenly knows what she has to do: Kevin must die.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say Not yet rated
Kids say (1 ):

By turns kooky and ominous, this experiment in TV narrative blends together two genres to make one arresting whole. When we meet Allison and her husband Kevin, they look like an all-too-typical TV couple under flat sitcom lighting. Kevin is the free-spirited id, Allison the hyper-organized killjoy, and the two plod through predictable sitcom jokes and hackneyed sitcom plots as the pumped-up laughs blare from the soundtrack given the slightest pretext.

But when Allison is alone, the lighting shifts to cinematic; her surroundings morph from working-class Worcester to something more elegant, the tone turns lightly surreal, and it's here that Allison starts to suspect that her husband's a walking cliché who's slowly sapping her will to exist. And as she tunes in more and more to the rage that was always lurking beneath her sitcom-mom façade, she starts to make choices that upend her comfortably crappy other life in ways that pull the rug out from the viewer, storywise. You won't want to wait to see what comes next; save up a bunch and binge away. Kevin is worth the lost weekend.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about how fantasy and science fiction often are ways to talk about tough real-world issues. Does the acceptance of the unreal make it easier to discuss the real? What types of shows are the sitcom segments of Kevin Can F--k Himself making fun of? What points are being made about women on TV and in society?

  • What time period and place is the show set in? How can you tell? How does a show communicate its setting in costumes, styling, stage dressing? Does the setting of the show change? What dramatic purpose is served by the changes in setting? How do visuals change as the setting changes?

  • Do parts of this show remind you of other TV shows? Are they supposed to? What is being communicated? Is this satire? Why or why not?

TV Details

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