Tina Fey Unbreakable Character Analysis

In episode twelve, Kimmy finally sets out to make sure her captor goes to prison for his crimes. She goes to trial and confronts the man who kept her locked in a bunker for fifteen years, Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne. The episodes about the trial seem to be attempting to criticize the way our justice system believes (or rather does not believe) women. When we watch the Reverend manipulate everyone in the courtroom, including the prosecutors, it seems insane how easily he did it — surely that could never work in real life — yet, that is the reality that we face. The final episodes, which feature Tina Fey as an incompetent prosecutor, are essentially satirizing the justice system’s imbalance and ineptitude at securing rape convictions.
While the characters in Unbreakable are not exclusively White, the featured characters of color do not exhibit nearly as much depth and development as Kimmy. With the exception of Kimmy’s roommate Titus, the recurring characters of color are basically caricatures with little identity. For instance, the show neglects to show the trauma experienced by Donna Maria Nunez — the only woman of color who was trapped in the bunker. She is one of the the least fleshed out character on the show and falls into stereotypes associated with Hispanic women on
Studies by the journal of Qualitative Sociology found that racial beliefs and stereotypes of mainstream media shape how people think about identities and ethnicities that fall outside of the American hegemonic norm. Hegemony is a word that describes mainstream ideologies that have been normalized. In the United States, for example, the hegemonic beauty standard is a Eurocentric one, one that values thinness, White, straight hair, and thin noses (Smith, Choueiti, and Pieper 16). People’s perception about what is pretty or beautiful does not exist in a vacuum. It has been informed by the time period they are born in and by the culture around. By transmitting selective images and ideas of female beauty, television not only teaches women to accept certain beliefs or values, but that they have to fit into a certain hegemonic body type to be seen as beautiful (Pyke and Dang