Will He Or Won’t He? The Suspense Is Killin’ Me #KevinProbablySavesTheWorld #3weekroundup #recap #review #ABC

Will He Or Won’t He? The Suspense Is Killin’ Me #KevinProbablySavesTheWorld #3weekroundup #recap #review #ABC

All pictures courtesy of ABC 

Back at it once again, ladies and gentlemen. This time I’m coming to you live and in words on a beautiful Ohio day. Today we will be looking at ABC’s new dramedy Kevin (Probably) Saves the World. So, is this show definitely going to end up in your must-see list or should it probably go quietly away? Let’s find out together. 

Kevin (Probably) Saves The World is a long-titled show starring Jason Ritter (son of the late John Ritter) as the titular character Kevin. In a rather somber and sullen mood, Kevin has to move back to his Midwest hometown after some of life’s devastation hit him hard in New York (talk more on that later). With no job and minimal money, he moves in with his twin sister Amy (played by Joanna Garcia Swisher) who is dealing with her own recent life-shaking event. Her husband died not but 18 months ago, making her a single mother to her daughter Reese—an angsty teenager who is still deeply affected by her father’s untimely passing. Now, while Amy absolutely adores her twin brother and is happy to have him back home (especially now that he can be a man around the house and maybe she can stop missing her husband so much), Reese is hardly thrilled about her hardly-there uncle suddenly interrupting their lives after having not seen him since her dad’s funeral. He barely even calls his sister and he’s generally an all-around bad uncle/brother.

Well, Amy is a highly successful engineering professor at the local college, which I’m guessing is quite prestigious in its own right because of the reputation she has. One night, a government helicopter lands on her front lawn (this is the Midwest somewhere and she seems to have a farm so its a big stretch of empty land on all sides of the house) and beckons her come ala Amy Adams in The Arrival. She is then flown to a secretive meeting in which she meets with some of the top generals in the US government to help figure out what’s going on with this most recent astronomical phenomenon. As it so happens, 36 meteorites fell to earth all on the same day/night across the globe. Where this number could conceivably be expected in a full year, such a number for one day is unheard of. So the government wants answers and all she can say is what the falling objects are not: some pre-arranged attack by another country. They give her the coordinates of the last one to land and she freaks because they are the coordinates for her house.

While she is doing that, Kevin has to try to watch over and bond with his niece Reese. She doesn’t want to be bothered and throws the reason why he’s really there in his face. And then they see the light of the falling meteorite, have to go out to see it, and he subsequently touches it like an idiot. The shock of it literally sends him flipping and flying through the air. Then, in some hallucinogenic malfunction, he next finds himself in the car stopping back at the front of his sister’s place with Reese yapping about what he was going to do with the meteorite. He has no idea how they got back home though he’s been driving for the last few minutes, and didn’t realize that he was the one to pick up the meteorite (its about a boulder’s size) and put it into the car. They both go in to go night-night, and then as soon as Reese falls asleep, Kevin hears something strange outside from his car. As he goes to see what it is, he realizes that the meteor seems to have turned into a black woman who tells him that she is there to help him save the world. And he faints.

He awakes the next morning to the black woman making him some kind of juice smoothie which he at first starts to ignore the taste of, then is moved nearly to tears at how good it is. Yes, this is actually important to the plot. He discovers that the black woman, played by Kimberly Hebert Gregory, is named Yvette. Who is she? Well, it’s complicated. To understand who she is, she has to tell him who he is. See, the world, at any given time, is supposedly protected from destruction and complete moral decay by 36 righteous people. No, they’re not politicians or the Pope or anything like that but average people whose efforts somehow manage to impact the whole of humanity. Think of them as the small group of righteous in the story of Lot, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham. For those that don’t know that Bible story, then go read it, but the refresher course is that God was going to destroy the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah but Abraham had his cousin Lot living there and didn’t want to see his family member killed. So Abraham, whom God loved, bargained with God in ever-decreasing numbers that if X number of righteous or good God-fearing people lived there, then God wouldn’t destroy the city. I think in the story he got down to ten and God agreed not to destroy the cities if he could find 10 righteous people. God had to destroy the cities.

Kevin and Yvette

Back to Kevin, he has a special task because not only is he one of the righteous but he is the last of the righteous. Apparently, the other 35 have gone missing. Are they dead? Did someone take them? If they were taken, then who took them and who would know they were the righteous? And in this little mystery you find a glint of why the critics like this show so much. So Yvette’s job is simply to protect Kevin and help guide him on his journey to find the other new 35 righteous. Yes, she’s basically his guardian angel but doesn’t prefer the term because nobody likes to go by the label of what they are anymore. But I digress.

But Kevin sees this as a big problem. Outside of the fact that he doesn’t believe anything she’s saying and thinks she’s a dangerous home intruder, she acts almost as if she doesn’t know why he was back home in the first place. The reason he came back to live with his loving twin sister is because he tried to kill himself back in New York. As we learn over the course of three episodes, he lost his job, went pretty broke and broke up with his girlfriend all in the course of a very short time, not to mention he lost contact with his sister and, as her twin brother, felt really bad about that. So he decided to end it all with some pills, but survived. He sees himself as being far from righteous.

Yvette knows all of this but must convince him that he is one of the righteous and that she is real. They run through a few scenes of the regular “Dude, I’m totally an angel” shtick—only Kevin can see her, she does some cool magic to save him from disaster, et cetera. And he starts to believe her, but still doesn’t want the job. It’s even stranger to him when she tells him that once he finds another righteous person, he’s simply supposed to hug them which will maybe reveal their righteousness to themselves or something. But he can’t tell them that he’s one of the righteous. In fact, he can’t tell anyone that he’s this special person and every time he tries to tell his sister, he only blurts out an embarrassing truth like how he once tasted her birth control pills when they were teens.

For the most part he wanders through the first episode getting reacquainted with his old town and listening to Yvette about what he’s supposed to do. He sees his old girlfriend who is now a teacher at the high school—in fact, she is one of Reese’s teachers—and has an awkward exchange with her. In the end, he’s just trying to be a good twin brother and uncle as he tries to bond with the important women in his life. He makes a few confessions to his sister and apologizes for not being there enough after her husband’s death. Amy asks for his help with Reese because she anguishes over how her daughter has seemingly checked out of life since her father’s death. She doesn’t like doing any of the stuff she used to, including playing soccer. Well, Kevin discovers that the reason she doesn’t want to play soccer anymore is because that used to be something she did with her dad a lot and now that he’s gone, she doesn’t want to do it without him. But he convinces her to choose something else that can be her new thing all to herself and she chooses theater.

Reese and Kevin

Finally, as he is about to leave to go back to New York and get out of Reese and Amy’s lives thinking that coming back was a big mistake, he runs into this guy in the airport who he can’t help but think is one of these righteous he is supposed to meet. After a long speech about how he felt crappy as a person and a brother because he stopped talking to his sister after her husband’s death because he didn’t know what to say and didn’t want to burden her with his problems, he asks to hug the guy only to find that the guy has been deaf the whole time. But he’s selling pencils to fund his travel or something—I couldn’t read the banner on the pencil. Well, Kevin buys the pencil, then empties his pockets to give him hundreds of dollars. The guy, in turn, hugs him and there’s light and it all seems magical like he’s just accomplished 1/35^th of his mission.

And then he gets back and Yvette tells him that the guy wasn’t one of the righteous. But Kevin does magically see some butterflies come out of his closet which Yvette can’t see and he knows that he’s on the right track. And his sister finally reveals that when he tried to commit suicide, it felt like he was leaving her and like she somehow failed as a sister. But all is not lost because Kevin is on a new path now.

Episode two is all about Kevin trying to figure out how to help people in order to make his righteousness power stronger so that he can ably find the other new righteous. Well, Yvette has to strip him of his love of earthly possessions and positions his car to be crushed by a monster farming truck so that he has to walk everywhere. She also has him doing remedial exercise out in the rain in order for him to feel as one with the beauty of God’s creation—yes, there is a God on this show. Her advice is to listen to the universe and what it wants for him. But Kevin tries to take a more proactive approach which you really can’t blame him for, even though it’s quite stupid. He puts out some of these hoe-like fliers that says he is willing to do “anything for free.” He and his sister get into a twin tiff when she confronts him on the fliers because she thinks that he’s throwing his life away and not taking things seriously and he thinks that she’s lollygagging on things too, like fixing up this old truck that he could really use to drive around.

To skip to the end of the truck storyline, the vehicle needed a carburetor which could’ve easily been gotten from some of the members in the town. Amy, however, didn’t want to get it because she didn’t really want to fix the truck because working on it was something that she and her husband did together. In the last 18 months since his death, she’d go out to tinker on it and talk to it as if her husband was still around. If she fixed the truck, she worried that might have to stop. Kevin convinces her that that won’t have to stop, he’s always in her memory and other heartwarming platitudes, and they fix the truck with a donated carburetor that the policeman who has a crush on Amy gifts her.

Back to the main story for the episode, Kevin passes out his fliers and tries to post them in his local friend’s bar but can’t seem to post one on this board with this other poster already there talking about a local brewery. It’s the universe’s sign. Well, Kevin goes to this brewery and asks the young guy working at the register if he needs help right now with anything and the guy keeps turning him down. The young guy went to the same high school as him and grew up in the town and now works at his father’s brewery and is about to take it over in a few years as his father is pretty old. The father calls the police on Kevin for being a general nuisance and it isn’t until Kevin meets the son again at the local bar that he realizes what he is supposed to do. See, the son is the only child of his parents which makes leaving a family business pretty difficult when your dad wants to pass it on to you. But the son hates beer, can’t stand it, doesn’t even drink it whereas his father’s passion is beer. He’s wanted to break away and pursue his own passion for years but hasn’t had the courage to tell his father. Kevin tells him that he’ll help him tell his father that he wants to do something else.

Well, before Kevin can come to the brewery the next day to help, the son has already told the father and the dad is cool with it. He even hopes his son finds his passion, too. And then the dad drops to the floor under a heart attack. Oh my god, Kevin has helped kill a man. But as it turns out, had he not had a mild heart attack then, he would’ve had a bigger one later that would’ve ended him. So the guy thanks Kevin in the hospital and says that a bigger beer-brewing company has wanted to buy his outfit for a while. All is well.

Episode three starts with Kevin sleepwalking his way from the house all the way to Amy’s college in a total Weekend at Bernie’s-style trampling. Stalking a balloon, he finally awakes in the early morning and finds that a crowd has gathered around him while he stands on the edge of the on-campus health services building. He grabs the balloon and comes off the building but only after his sister sees him standing up there and panics that he’s trying to kill himself again. She calls his shrink while Kevin sets out on another universe-led mission.

See, Kevin goes into the health services building where Amy has tried to set up a meeting for him with the on-campus therapist. But as he walks in with the balloon in hand, the woman working the front desk sees the message on the balloon and says, “Hey, Pookie is my nickname.” And I was like, “Whaaaa!” Totally expected for that nickname to be that of a black person’s, but I digress. As it happens, she’s planning a wedding and is so stressed about it that she probably needs some counseling herself. Well, Yvette tells Kevin the answers to three of the woman’s hypothetical, rhetorical questions and the lady is like, “wow, you’re right. You must be really good with this wedding stuff.” And now Kevin’s helping with a wedding.

While Kevin helps with a wedding, his shrink comes to town as he was on his way to some conference in the area. He stops to tell Amy that none of this was really her fault and she shouldn’t feel how most family members feel after someone tries to commit suicide: like they’ve failed. He also says that Reese is a normal teenager and she shouldn’t worry about her grieving process either. Speaking of, Reese has been doing some spying on her uncle and seems to be putting things together about him always talking to himself. From her looks, she suspects that his frequent convos with no one are not some mental break but something deeper, even though she can’t see Yvette.

And as far as Yvette, she is visited by another one of the non-angel angels. After she revealed to Kevin that coming to guard him is a one-way ticket out of paradise, we as viewers really feel for the other angels who are currently on earth. The mission of the other 35 is now lost because the other righteous are gone. But even worse, they’ve all lost hope in trying to figure out what happened to their righteous. They’ll, conceivably, just roam the earth forever or disappear out of existence. The network of support Yvette thought she’d have is nowhere to be found. And we see a slight twinge when her other angel friend suggests that it is great that she has Kevin. Yvette says that 36 righteous couldn’t have just disappeared and that is yet another clue or just a slip-up that deepens the mystery about where the righteous went and if Kevin even is one of the actual righteous.

Back to Kevin’s thing, as he goes through with helping plan the wedding, he learns that the woman is already married to a firefighter but they didn’t get a wedding the first time because the lady had cancer and it was a quickie thing where she thought she’d die in six months. Well, now that the cancer is in remission, she doesn’t want to be married anymore, even though she thinks she married a really great guy. Kevin now has to figure out a way to break up the marriage so they both can be happy. Well, the guy is still very much in love with his lady and is only dissuaded from that love when she lies instead of confessing the truth, and says that she’s having an affair with Kevin. Kevin catches a punch to the face in front of his therapist.

Kevin awakes and goes to find the woman standing on top of the same building he almost fell off of earlier and learns that this is where the firefighter husband proposed. Well, she confesses again that she didn’t feel like she could tell her husband how she didn’t want to be married anymore, but doesn’t know that Kevin invited the firefighter to come. The husband hears the whole conversation and they make amends and are satisfied to break off the marriage for now and get a good laugh in at how Kevin is so not the woman’s type—not enough muscles and she really likes the man-beef. Kevin has yet another small vision/experience that shows him on an island somewhere with tons of shaman-masked people dancing over him, and Yvette tells him that just like the butterflies and water before, this has something to do with him finding the other righteous. He must continue to build his spiritual powers.

What’s my grade? I give this a A-. Yes, this show is, at times, goofy, but it is also heart-warming without being overly sentimental, deals with suicide in a way that I have dealt with suicide in past comedies (none of those are published, by the way) and, despite the sometimes adult subject matter, is really a family show so far. I like that even though it is technically a case-of-the-week show, it is not a cop show and it has enough family drama as well as two overarching mysteries to keep any viewer’s attention. The questions of what happened to the other 35 righteous, what or to where are Kevin’s visions leading him, and if Kevin really is supposed to be one of the righteous or not are all not heavy on the plot, yet are so apparent and relevant to the series that they can entangle many viewers.

With that said, don’t expect the highest of writing techniques displayed here. Because of the spiritual element of the series there is always going to be a lot of convenient coincidence that drives the plot forward. So long as you keep it in mind that random things will happen just to benefit the plot and/or the characters, the show should be enjoyable. The acting is pretty good and the connections between characters is natural and fluid similar to what a small Midwest town would feel like. To me, this show is like eating a piece of warm apple pie on a cold fall day during the holidays. There’s something uniquely comforting about the raw truthfulness of the show.

I haven’t done this much this season but throwing on my TV programming-executive hat for a moment, I would have to say that I can’t understand why this show is not on ABC Sundays rather than the unfriendly, unpopular Tuesdays spot. Yes, I know that ABC is trying to gear up for American Idol to come on in the Spring block on Sundays for three hours, but Kevin Probably Saves The World is the most Sunday-oriented show that ABC has produced since Resurrection went defunct a few years back. It has the religious element, humor for the family, good values and plays for a full hour that takes you on an emotional journey into people’s lives. The stuff that they currently have on Sundays with Toy Box and Shark Tank, while nice unscripted shows, are hardly what will draw eyeballs when people are readying to go to work and want something wholesome for the kids. But you know what, I digress. We will see if anything shifts on the schedule and how well this and American Idol does over the coming season. But I would definitely hope that this stays around for the full season.

Should you be watching? Yes. This is not a This Is Us kind of drama that digs exceptionally deep into the emotional background of each character, but it does scratch a little deeper than the surface. It also isn’t on the level of Stranger Things as far as weirdness goes, but it does have a quirky charm to it in which the actors shine (especially Jason Ritter) and the plot moves forward in every episode. Kevin (Probably) Saves The World airs on ABC Tuesdays at 10pm. Also catch it on ABC On Demand and ABC.com.

What do you think? Have you heard of Kevin (Probably) Saves The World? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll tune in now? If you do tune in, make sure you catch the show from the first episode or else you will be lost. If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Did you like it? What do you think they can improve on the show? Do you think that Kevin is really one of the righteous or is Yvette trying to pull a fast one? And on what episode do you think that Kevin will finally meet another righteous person? Let me know in the comments below.

Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend. #AhStalking

If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinary on Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.

Until next time, “OK, I don’t know if I said this before but it is possible that I maybe could be, uh... a wealth African prince from a land of milk, honey, nectar and bounteous gifts untold. That’s not a dealbreaker is it?”

‘Uh... What?’

P.S. I don’t know if I should mention how they are still actively trying to write and produce another Coming To America or if I should totally ignore that and say something meta about the show like how is it that Kevin keeps moving farther into the island on every episode? First he only saw the butterflies, then he was out in the ocean, then he was on the island. Next, he’ll be deep in the jungle, then on the side of the volcano and we all know what happens on tiny islands with volcanoes. We’ve all seen that Tom Hanks movie and Hanks would never lie. He’s a white American angel!

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