Kevin (Probably) Saves the World
Our Review
The best premise ABC put on air that season belonged to a show almost nobody watched: a self-absorbed, perpetually broke former Wall Street guy moves in with his widowed twin sister and her teenage daughter in Taylor, Texas, touches a meteor, and gets told by an angel with a clipboard that he is the last of the world’s thirty six righteous souls. Kevin (Probably) Saves the World ran sixteen episodes in 2017 and 2018, took a sixty three percent from critics who mostly mistook its sincerity for blandness, and built a ninety five percent audience score and IMDb 7.7 among the few who found it. ABC cancelled it without ceremony. That cancellation is still one of the more baffling decisions of the network’s recent era.
Jason Ritter does the hardest version of this job. Playing a man whose every instinct is selfish, then letting him discover that doing the right thing costs something every single time, requires holding the joke and the pain in the same take, and Ritter never lets either one go. After years of playing the reliable son on other people’s shows, this is the part that proved he carries one. JoAnna Garcia Swisher’s twin Amy, an aeronautical engineer raising a teenager alone, gives the show its spine, and Kimberly Hebert Gregory’s angel Yvette, celestial bureaucracy in a cream blazer, is the best comedic concept on the broadcast dial that season: miracles as paperwork, salvation as a performance review.
Created by Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters, the pilot directed by Paul McGuigan, the show is a good deeds of the week affair and it earns that shape. One episode sends Kevin to help a man with thirty minutes to live. Another locks him into the truth about his own suicide attempt, handled with a lightness that never becomes disrespect. The show is genuinely funny for hours and genuinely moving without warning, the tonal whiplash the writers aim for on purpose. Its problem, if it had one, was the same problem every ABC miracle show has: it asked for Friday night faith in an era when faith was worth more on streaming.
Seven out of ten. Sixteen episodes, one long season, a clean ending. It streams on Disney+ in Canada, Australia and New Zealand; in the US it has sat buy only since the cancellation, the sad afterlife of most ABC shows. Nothing about it deserves the word cancelled, and the audience score, ninety five percent from people who actually finished it, agrees.
