Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

What worked especially well last season also gets better in the second.

Fey and Carlock have delivered basically the same show they did a year ago. Given how great that original NBC version was, I can't really complain. If your biscotti recipe is already deliciously weird, why change the ingredients?

Season two of the show is more enjoyable than season one because, for long stretches, it barely remembers what it's about, plot-wise, and enters that trancelike comedy zone where some of the best sketch comedy resides--a place of one-damn-thing-after-another inventiveness.

Beyond Kimmy's personal issues, Unbreakable continues to highlight some outstanding comedic performances within the ensemble. ... Not every note is in perfect harmony--especially when it comes to the way this season reacts to the way Season 1 was criticized for its depiction of race. Rather than shy away from controversial issues, like Jacqueline's "real" background as a Native American, Season 2 makes that storyline a major focus of the first episode.

Kimmy gets a little smarter, too, and finds relations outside that circle of new life that embraced her last year.

In season two, much of the same goofiness that killed you in season one is back.

Each episode of Kimmy Schmidt is so dense it’s like a binge-watch unto itself. Watch one and be full.

It’s almost cartoonish in its approach to the sitcom, to an extreme that sometimes pushes it into avant-garde territory: Not only would Daffy Duck understand what Kimmy is up to--so would turn-of-the-20th-century Dada and Surrealist artists. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is Fey and Carlock’s PhD project in comedy.

Season two pushes things in even more metatextual directions, largely to good ends.

What sets the show apart is its tireless, formless, free-flowing pursuit of laughs--and a cast that can ride that wave while also giving some human dimension to what are essentially vaudevillian characters.

Throughout the second season of this wildly funny and joyous series, Kimmy comes to embody a full knowledge of the power of being kind and helpful, even when people don’t deserve such aid or the world convinces you that such acts are negligible in the face of wide-scale murder, rampant bigotry, and worldwide corruption.

Still-irresistible. ... Krakowski, Kane and Tituss Burgess, who plays Kimmy's roommate Titus Andromedon, all have had character upgrades.

It’s a show about a woman intent on moving forward that’s at its best when it’s looking backward.

The jokes are still, often, wildly funny (and they come densely-packed enough that if you don’t like one, you’ll have all of 15 seconds to wait), but it seems more clear than ever the unpleasant point Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is working toward: That all of us, especially the viewership, are dupes.