It’s been less than a month since “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” took to Netflix and dazzled audiences.
If you haven’t yet watched this quick, kaleidoscopic 13-episode journey, then you better have a good excuse, and that excuse better be that you’re going to watch it the moment this semester ends.
Whether or not you’ve seen it yet or if you’ve read anything about the show, you’ve probably heard that the role of representation on the show has been a site of discussion, especially the treatment of Asians and ?Native Americans.
However, many have agreed creators Tina Fey and Robert Carlock hit the glossy nail on the head when conceiving Titus Andromedon played by Tituss Burgess.
We don’t get to see a lot of good representations of black men in television, and we see even fewer queer men. The fact that Titus is both black and queer is as common as seeing a werewolf on TV.
For me, the representational success of Titus goes beyond the intersection of race and sexual orientation.
A poor queer character in a comedy is far more rare than any television ?lycanthrope.
Titus is broke. He lives in a perpetual struggle to pay rent by working odd and often undignified jobs. You could say his bank account has six digits but only if those digits are 0002.00.
The reason why Titus adopts Kimmy (Ellie Kemper) as his new apartment mate in the first place is because he needed help with rent or else risk being kicked to the streets by their sympathetic landlady, Lillian (Carol Kane).
As you speed through the show, you are truly binge-watching exposure to the all to real world of queer ?impoverishment.
The spunky comedy doesn’t hit you with statistics, but I will. Twenty percent of LGBT people living alone make less than $12,000 annually. Transgender people have higher rates of education than the average person but are still four times more likely to make less than $10,000 annually.
Most television shows resist featuring queer characters who aren’t financially comfortable.
But then let’s compare that to all of the financially comfortable queer characters seen in “Will and Grace,” “Modern Family,” “The L Word,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal,” “The Good Wife,” “How to Get Away with Murder,” “Empire,” “Penny Dreadful,” “Looking,” “House of Cards,” “Queer as Folk,” “The Fosters,” “Girls,” “American Horror Story,” and the list goes on.
But I have a word count to obey. Even in the world of “Game of Thrones,” queerness as an identity seems exclusive to the well-to-do of Westeros.
“Orange is the New Black” is among the mighty few in which LGBT characters and financial straights overlap.
What this tells me is Netflix is aware that its young, binge-watching viewers are thirsting for more comprehensive representations of queer characters, including bringing awareness to the fact that not all queer people in the world are the doctor, lawyer, executive, politician yuppies we see on TV.
These Netflix characters also defy tokenism, which makes the representation more significant. Titus is fiscally poor but also ambitious because of the hunger for international attention he is agonizingly denied.
gmleeds@indiana.edu
