Kevin (Probably) Saves the World

This past week was the season finale of Kevin (Probably) Saves the World, and I hope that there is a second season, because it is a very good show. To catch you up on the first season incase you missed it, Kevin moves home to live with his twin sister Amy and her daughter Reese. Kevin recently tried to commit suicide after losing his job and his fiance in one day and it has been recommended that he get support from his only family which means leaving New York City for Taylor, Texas where everyone he knows appears to have hit a sort of dead end in a small town compared to his life in the big city. But then thirty-six meteors of considerable size hit the earth within hours of each other and the last one lands within sight of Kevin's home. Kevin goes to check it out and is surprised to find out that the meteor is actually Yvette, a celestial being from Paradise who has come with her friends to help protect and guide the thirty-sixrighteous souls who guide and protect humanity, and Kevin is one of them. Yvette appears normal, but only to Kevin because she is invisible to everyone else, and she has the power to protect Kevin from harm in any way necessary. Kevin on the other hand has no power except bizarre visions that remind him of the small tasks he needs to do to help others and make the world a better place. Kevin's weakness is that while he gets intense nudges in the right direction, he is not given any special resources to make anything happen so when it counts, it's all on Kevin to save the day the way any ordinary person would be able to, and Kevin is not at all equipped mentally to figure out the best way all on his own, so there's a lot of trial and error. And one more thing, the other thirty-five righteous souls are MIA and Kevin must find them and annoint them, and by the end of the first season, he has found three of them, which means thirty-two to go and he's making good time.

The supporting cast for Kevin includes Kristin, his ex-girlfriend who is now the principal at Reese's school and a large part of the story is Kevin getting a second chance at the one who got away who may be his soul mate. Then there's Amy's possible soul mate, Nathan, the sherriff who went to school with them and knows Kevin well enough to look the other way when he does something bordeline illegal for the greater good. But possibly the best is Kevin's best friend, the unbelievably optimistic Tyler who is fat, lives with his mom, works at a diner where his boss treats him like crap and got dumped by his girlfriend and yet still thinks his life is perfect the way it is and probably should have been chosen over Kevin. Each character helps bring out out something special in Kevin that leads to him becoming a better person, saving himself as much as he saves the world.

The show is great because despite the tiny miracles that help Kevin along, the major impact is an ordinary guy performing ordinary good deeds. He is not the brightest and he is very flawed in many ways, but he tries to do the right thing and while he is somewhat reluctant a first he quickly gives in to the universe and the good feeling of helping people even though he gets nothing in return and often gets into trouble. The quirkiness of it all, punctuated by an equally quirky soundtrack of happy and often comical woodwinds, sends a strong message of hope, to think maybe all we need is to just be good and listen to the universe when it nudges us in the right direction and we can all be everyday heroes like Kevin. One great moment is the episode where Kevin finds his first righteous soul and people he helped earlier in the season help him along the way in return. Basically everything happens for a reason, we just don'tusually know what that reason is, but sometimes from the worst moments come the best things we never expected.

This show can be compared to a lot of other shows, most notably Joan of Arcadia which also was about an ordinary person who was doing good deeds for God thanks to an invisible guide, and also starred Jason Ritter as a character named Kevin. More recently though was Eli Stone, an unfortunate victim of the writer's strike about a lawyer who had visions that directed him to do the right thing, although that show played with ambiguity whether these visions came from god or they were just hallucinations resulting from an aneurysm. If it hadn't been for the writer's strike, Eli Stone probably would have had as good a run as Joan of Arcadia, and Kevin could last longer than both combined, and I hope it does, because we are in a time that we need this ray of hope.