Female friendships have been a television mainstay for nearly as long as there has been television. Lucy and Ethel’s I Love Lucy high jinks hit CBS in 1951, within a decade of the network’s creation. Carol Burnett and Vicki Lawrence’s real-life friendship shone through on the innovative sketch-comedy series The Carol Burnett Show. The ’70s saw the premiere of groundbreaking live-action series like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Laverne & Shirley and animated cult classics like Josie and the Pussycats. In ensuing decades, the friendships of Sex and the City, Gilmore Girls, Girlfriends, The Golden Girls, Living Single, and Friends mostly bounced around the sitcom space. Representation hasn’t been equal, and for many decades it was mostly white, but all that history has led to a certain template for what a show about women looks like and focuses on: romantic relationships, workplace drama, and how close friends can become found family. This year, the final seasons of Kevin Can F*** Himself and Dead to Me followed that formula, but with one key shared difference: In both series, men’s deaths were a requirement for women’s self-actualization.
Dark comedy, black comedy, dramedy; whatever descriptor you prefer, it has applied to AMC’s Kevin Can F*** Himself and Netflix’s Dead to Me from their respective beginnings. The former premiered in 2021 and followed unfulfilled housewife Allison McRoberts (Annie Murphy), who is married to Kevin (Eric Petersen), an instantly recognizable TV husband — lazy, uncouth, dismissive of and insulting toward Allison. From the opening scene of pilot “Living the Dream,†the series experimented with form, toggling between multi-camera and single-camera formats to demonstrate how a typical sitcom would present the McRoberts marriage versus how Kevin Can F*** Himself would present their marriage. In multi-camera mode, the McAllister home is brightly, almost garishly, lit, the laugh track is omnipresent, and there’s an undercurrent of approval toward Kevin’s abusive antics given their unfortunate familiarity in this genre. When Allison walks into their home’s kitchen three minutes into the episode, Kevin Can F*** Himself makes its first switch into single-camera mode, with a dim color palette, a centering of Murphy’s agonized expression, and a zoom in on her barely contained scream. After being trapped in this marriage for a decade, Allison has nearly reached her breaking point, and the only person who seems to notice is next-door neighbor Patty (Mary Hollis Inboden), whose brother Neil (Alex Bonifer) is Kevin’s best friend. Once Allison decides to kill Kevin, Patty isn’t so much disapproving of the plan as she’s unsure of whether Allison can go through with it.
Dead to Me, the first season of which premiered in 2019, also started off with troubled unions. In the pilot, real estate agent Jen’s (Christina Applegate) husband was recently killed in a hit-and-run, and she’s grappling with her resulting rage at a grief-support group. Her confusion over Ted’s death is compounded by the unhappy place they were in their marriage before the accident, and she sees some of the same loneliness in new group member Judy (Linda Cardellini), who shares that she lost her fiancé, Steve (James Marsden), eight weeks ago. Jen soon learns that Judy was lying about Steve’s death (she was actually grieving her fifth miscarriage, and Steve dumping her because of it), but she forgives Judy because she understands the desperation of the lie, and the pain that led to it. That baseline of recognition remains the throughline of their friendship, even as Dead to Me puts the women through the wringer in season one: Jen’s shock and pain when she learns that Judy was driving the car that hit Ted; the emotional abuse Steve levels at Judy; Judy’s early-menopause diagnosis, which puts an end to her dreams of giving birth to her own child; and Steve’s cruel behavior toward Jen, which leads to her attacking and accidentally killing him.
Each series asked viewers to engage with its world on its own terms. In Kevin Can F*** Himself, that request was tied to the series’s movement between comedy and drama, genres that Armstrong, the writing team, and the series’s most prolific director, Anna Dokoza, amplified to extremes to convey Allison’s feelings of erasure and helplessness. In the sitcom-styled scenes, the dialogue is dominated by Kevin’s insults and one-liners, the compositions position Kevin in the middle of the literal frame and the figurative action, and the background laughter is fawning and repetitive. The sequences from Allison’s perspective have shallower focus, a lack of background music and diegetic noise, and a visual pallor, which communicate her claustrophobia and growing impulsiveness.
As Kevin Can F*** Himself elevated Patty to co-lead status in season two, the dramatic approach also built out her domestic life: her resentment of Neil taking her for granted, her hesitation to leave Worcester, her navigation of her sexuality, and her uncertainty about whether her relationship with police detective Tammy (Candice Coke) had a future. And as Allison and Patty grew more defined, their friendship did, too. Whether they were breaking bad (planning to poison Kevin, detaining Neil, looking through unclaimed corpses to see if one of them could pass as Allison) or doing good (sharing their hopes and dreams, bonding over their childhoods, napping together while sloppy drunk), Murphy and Inboden brought tenderness and loyalty to their treatment of each other — in direct contrast to how Kevin and Neil interacted, with increasing derision and scorn, in the sitcom scenes. Each approach needs the other to balance Kevin Can F*** Himself’s parallel arguments: that sitcoms don’t just reinforce white, cishet-male exceptionalism, but further it via laughter that normalizes and encourages such behavior; and that female aimlessness and antipathy is often given short shrift in narrative storytelling, rather than attention and interpretation.
Although its body count was higher, Dead to Me didn’t deviate from comedy as often as Kevin Can F*** Himself. Instead, its challenge to audiences was keeping up with its rapidly paced narrative pivoting (cliffhangers that were unveiled with high drama and then, an episode or two later, diffused winkingly) and sorting through the web of lies Judy and Jen told their families and friends, including Steve’s twin brother and Jen’s new love interest Ben (also Marsden); the police investigating Ted’s death and Steve’s disappearance, led by Detective Perez (Diana-Maria Riva); and sometimes each other. This sinuous storytelling looked easy in Applegate’s and Cardellini’s hands, though, thanks to their appealing oppositional chemistry: Applegate’s brusque abrasiveness, Cardellini’s sunny ebullience. As Dead to Me progressed, the women found their own tempo, ping-ponging dialogue back and forth, finishing each other’s sentences, and mimicking each other’s body language. And yet Dead to Me never diminished the fact that personal loss had brought these women together — loss that they, unknowingly and then knowingly, inflicted on each other.
That loss is what both Kevin Can F*** Himself and Dead to Me used as an open door for their female characters to walk through, a chrysalis to transform them, and a catalyst to accelerate their reconstruction. By the time each series reached its final season, the primary pairs in these shows weren’t just allies in shared criminal goals (killing Kevin and faking Allison’s death; covering up Steve’s death), but friends, aware and accepting of what the other was capable of. In Kevin Can F*** Himself’s second season premiere, “Mrs. McRoberts is Dead,†Patty refuses to let Allison present herself as entirely innocent (“You’re not just some victimâ€) because she’s experienced Allison’s ability to plan, conceal, and obfuscate, and she won’t let her underplay those qualities. In Dead to Me’s “We Didn’t Think This Through,†Jen refuses to let Judy go through cancer treatment alone because she believes she deserves the hardship for inadvertently taking Ted’s life. Avoiding guilt was an important motivator for these women, but more pressing was their concern for each other’s futures. Once Allison and Patty, and Jen and Judy, found each other, how could they part? They would turn on their family members, as Patty does with Neil, or sabotage new relationships, as Jen nearly does with Ben, rather than abandon each other. Their friendship has made them better, bolder, and more themselves, and the possibility of losing that is unimaginable.
The irony here, of course, is that this interdependence is born out of death. In their concluding acts, Kevin Can F*** Himself and Dead to Me use their central partnerships as evidence not just of female interdependence, but of female independence as only possible through male erasure. In Kevin Can F*** Himself’s finale, “Allison’s House,†six months have passed since Allison staged her own death and left town without telling Patty where she was going. Patty is unmoored, and Inboden adds an edge of despair to all her interactions with other people. She’s disinterested in her relationship with Tammy, distant from her brother Neil, and insistent to Allison’s ex-boyfriend Sam (Raymond Lee) that she knows Allison better than he does and that they should find her. Patty’s admission that “now that I’m left here without her, I don’t feel better off. I just feel left†syncs up with how Tammy describes Patty as “one of those captain’s widows, waiting for him to come back.†And Allison, in her new life, also seems diminished: quieter, more subdued, and lacking the verve that used to define her dynamic with Patty. They can’t function separately, and their full selfhood requires both each other and the fulfillment of their initial goal to remove Kevin.
So that’s what Kevin Can F*** Himself does. Back in sitcom mode, Allison tells Kevin she wants a divorce, and the invisible audience who once laughed at Kevin’s jokes cheers and claps in support of his beleaguered wife. Armstrong, who both directed and wrote the series finale, then uses drama mode for the first time with Kevin, turning him nasty, belligerent, and physically threatening as Allison sticks to her decision to leave. (Peterson, who always did well with Kevin’s dopey-yet-infuriating self-absorption, nails the heel turn into intentional malevolence.) When Kevin’s trashcan fire of Allison’s possessions spreads throughout the house, with him inside, it’s an act of destruction that finally sets Allison and Patty free. As the women sit together and gaze upon the burnt shell of the McAllisters’s former home, their conversation is dotted through with the same black humor as always (“For once, he finally did something you wanted him to,†Patty says to Allison of Kevin’s death), but also exudes a new kind of comfort. They’ve ostracized others from their lives (Neil and Tammy have left town; it’s unclear whether Sam and Allison will get back together), but they have each other. Patty and Allison clasp hands, and vow to “die alone together,†with mirrored expressions of commiseration and relief on their faces. The song playing over the final scene, the Boswell Sisters’s “Shout, Sister, Shout!â€, includes the lyric “Get that old Devil right off your heel!â€, and it’s not too much of a stretch to assume that Kevin is the Devil in this scenario, vanquished by Patty and Allison. With him gone, they can be themselves.
Dead to Me, which had already killed off Ted and Steve in its first season and then used the second and third seasons to bond Jen and Judy together as best friends and co-moms to Jen’s sons, deploys another death to illuminate who Jen and Judy have become. After the cops find Steve’s body in a federal forest and the FBI takes over the case, Judy is diagnosed with cervical cancer and undergoes unsuccessful chemotherapy treatment. “Whatever happens, we are in this together,†Jen and Judy had agreed earlier in the season, and in Judy’s final weeks, they admit their wrongdoing to the police but then abscond to Mexico. Finale “We’ve Reached the End†begins with a poetically circular moment: The pair once again defend each other from bad men, this time shaking off the Greek Syndicate goons following them. Then, they do all the things best friends do on vacation, in a sequence of scenes that show off the affection Applegate and Cardellini clearly have for each other on screen and off. They drink (alcohol for Judy; none for the pregnant Jen), they talk about sex, they watch the sunset and The Facts of Life, they hold hands, they celebrate that Jen is having a daughter, they get reflective and melancholy, tender and raw.
While Allison and Patty ended Kevin Can F*** Himself at the beginning of a new chapter created by Kevin’s death, Jen and Judy wrap up a journey already endured and enjoyed. Judy’s “I’ve had the best time, Jen†and Jen’s “You changed my life†reply are achingly sincere moments in a series that so often sprints through silly wordplay, and the visions Jen later sees of Judy are far different from the moments when she imagined Steve. How Dead to Me positions Jen’s final admission to Ben that she killed his brother isn’t out of responsibility toward Judy’s abusive ex, but toward Judy herself. If deja vu is “your brain reminding you to remember,†as Jen quotes Judy saying, then telling the truth about what happened to Steve is Jen allowing herself to remember who she is — and be at peace with whatever happens as a result.
“We’re just a bunch of tired, rundown gals,†Judy says in Dead to Me’s “We’ll Find a Way†as she and Jen try to get an FBI agent off their tail, and there’s truth to that description for both the women of Dead to Me and Kevin Can F*** Himself. They’ve grieved, plotted, and fibbed. They’ve confirmed what they don’t want out of life, and with whom they want to cut ties. They’ve navigated the murky morality of whether their actions were justified, and accepted the toll of their actions. They’ve realized the new relationships they want to prioritize, and the kind of people they want to be — not victims, but survivors. And when they finally have time to rest, they’re able to do so with another woman who understands that sometimes personhood can only be realized through termination rather than tolerance.