Re-write the laugh track

February 2025

By: Kiki Pape

I find myself cheering for the main character, Allison, in the hit Netflix show; Kevin can go fuck himself when she tries to kill her husband. Similar to Tony Soprano in The Sopranos and Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad. The only difference is that Allison is female. With cheering on the Anti-hero, we typically cheer on a flawed male figure going through a difficult time in their life, yet through the media, we find rare chances to find a flawed female trying to figure life out. We watch these characters in very human-like situations and can see their lives through various angles, being able to empathize with these characters. 

The show opens up like any other sitcom: bright lights, canned laughter, a husband cracking jokes at his wife's expense while she plasters on a patient smile. We know this rhythm by heart. As a society, we grew up with shows like Everybody Loves Raymond, The Brady Bunch, and a hundred other shows and media where the husband is a lovable buffoon, and the wife is long-suffering, eye-rolling. However, something shifts—the air and lighting in the room change. The laughter starts to fade. Moreover, suddenly, we are no longer in a sitcom. 

The rage simmers beneath every exhausted sitcom wife and sets it on fire. Through Allison's eyes, we do not just see frustration; we FEEL the years of dismissal, the entrapment, the slow erosion of self until she is no longer a person but a punchline. Moreover, for the first time, that punchline bites back. 

Where sitcoms have trained us to chuckle at the hapless man-child and the wife who "puts up with him," this show rips off the laugh track and forces us to see the wreckage left behind—the dual visual drives us home. Where we only have seen introductions of female rage in movies and novels like Gone Girl (2012) or Pearl (2021), audiences finally see the apparent mistreatment of women through the dual visuals. In the sitcom world, Kevin's selfishness is harmless fun. However, in the darker, single-camera sequences, the illusion is gone and is reality. 

Moreover, that rage is not just Allison's. It belongs to every woman who has been told to smile, to play along, and to laugh at things that were never even funny. The show taps into something primal, like promising Young Woman and Gone Girl, stories where women's fury is no longer weaponized. However, Allison's revenge is not about dominance or destruction but escape. 

The absolute joke was never Kevin. It was the idea that Allison, or any woman like her, would stay in the story written FOR her. And the punchline? She will not.