‘Kevin’ Review: Jason Schwartzman, Aubrey Plaza in Amazon Cat Cartoon

When Kevin (voiced by Jason Schwartzman), star of Amazon’s new animated series Kevin, suffers a bad breakup, he does what any young man in the big city might do.

He moves out of his old place, picks up new friends and new interests, explores his former neighborhood with fresh eyes. He takes time alone to think about what he really wants out of a relationship, or out of life. He considers new potential life partners, and eventually courts one. Occasionally, unhappily, he backslides into contact with his ex.

What makes Kevin’s journey more unexpected than most is that he is no fleece-vested banker or tattooed barista, but a tuxedo cat; his split is not with a lover but with his human owners. The feline twist is enough to make Kevin, created by Joe Wengert and Aubrey Plaza, feel like a fresh spin on the hangout comedy. If it only occasionally lives up to its fullest potential for humor and heart, it eventually finds enough warmth to be worth curling up with.

Doubtless a huge chunk of the target audience for Kevin just read that plot description and prepared to react in much the same way that Seth (Gil Ozeri), a normally milquetoast animal shelter manager, does to an owner who’d dared give up his cat: “Abandoning a furry companion is the ultimate no no!” he screeches. “You belong in the Hague, asshole!” So rest assured that this is no Sarah MacLachlan-soundtracked sob story of abandonment.

It is, instead, Kevin who leaves when the couple who own him announce they’re breaking up, deciding he’d rather take his chances by himself than follow Dana (Plaza) to her new home. Since Kevin is set in a universe that sits somewhere between The Secret Life of Pets and Bojack Horseman on the spectrum of anthropomorphized creatures — animals communicate in English with humans and sit next to them at the bar or on the train, but don’t seem to rent apartments or, for the most part, have steady jobs — Dana has not much choice but to let him go and hope he wants to return someday.

After a disastrous evening in Central Park, during which the squirrels in the trees mock the house cat’s spectacular unsuitability for life in the “wild,” Kevin makes his way to Seth’s Furrever Friends shelter in Astoria, Queens. There, he makes a new home amid a motley crew that also includes an imperious Persian named Armando (an excellent John Waters); a dopey and diseased kitten named Judy (Aparna Nancherla); Seth’s bossy Shih Tzu (a hilariously mean Amy Sedaris); and Cupcake (Whoopi Goldberg), a feral cat with side hustles streaming on an OnlyFans-esque website and selling her vomit on the dark web. (How she’s navigating the banking system and what she needs the money for in the first place are not questions Kevin really gets around to answering. It’s best just not to think about the practicalities too hard.)

Especially in its early going, Kevin is hit or miss as a vehicle for humor. Some of its jokes, like a bit about a duck’s corkscrew-shaped penis, smack of a series trying too hard to declare that it’s Not Your Little Sister’s Animal Cartoon. Others, like a hoary line about cats being baffled by why people are always scooping litter, make no sense in a universe where cats have opposable thumbs and speak human language. At least one subplot, involving an equine Broadway star named Patti LuPony who’s voiced by Patti LuPone, feels like a Bojack Horseman castoff. Lots more punchlines just sort of sit there, neither offensive enough to provoke groans nor clever enough to coax laughs.

But as the series found its groove over its eight half-hours — and, perhaps, as I grew more accustomed to its off-kilter sense of humor — the ratio of hits to misses improves. Kevin eventually falls into the likable rhythms of a New York hangout comedy à la Friends or Seinfeld or, more recently, Adults, albeit with a much higher level of absurdity. The series feels most surprising and most delightful when it gives itself over to full-bore silliness, as with a C-plot in which a colony of ants crown Judy as their new queen, or another in which Kevin meets Rat Pizza — a sentient slice of pizza that drags a dead rat around and bitterly laments how unfavorably he’s treated compared to his celebrity inverse.

Eventually, somewhere amid all the Gen Z-coded kittens and the incestuous cat romances, something more earnest starts to emerge. There’s real sweetness in the way the characters relate to each other, whether it’s Armando reminding Judy to hold out for the right forever home rather than let herself get adopted by a narcissistic nepo baby who sees her only as a prop for her art, or in Cupcake nudging Armando to come to terms with a past heartbreak involving a previous owner.

Kevin’s meandering search to figure out what he wants out of his next human companion (or if, indeed, he wants another human companion at all) will feel relatable to anyone who’s ever gotten out of a long-term relationship unsure who they might be outside of it — if they ever even actually liked Halloween or the band Pavement or the show Say Yes to the Dress, or just assumed they did because their partner did.

But embedded within his quest is also the more pet-specific acknowledgment that though we may take them in and feed them and link our contact addresses to their microchips, our animal companions have interiorities of their own, wants and needs that might coincide with our own or might not. Kevin, which press materials indicate is based on a real cat and a real breakup, becomes a tender love letter to the unknowability of the creatures who’ve deigned to let us share in their lives. Speaking as a proud cat lady, I can’t think of a nicer thing to say about Plaza and Wengert than this: They seem like they must be absolutely wonderful pet owners.