Joe Wengert

The joke in Kevin (2026) is that a cat has an inner life and most of it is filth. Kevin, voiced by Jason Schwartzman, is a New York cat in a Queens pet rescue, and for four of its eight episodes the series Joe Wengert built with Aubrey Plaza does what he spent eight years doing on Big Mouth: it puts a crude line in a small mouth and waits for the gasp. Then, roughly halfway, it changes its mind and turns into a small, careful story about growing up and about what a pet knows. We scored it 56, and nearly all of those points were earned in the second half.

Wengert is a room writer by trade, and the rooms tell the story. He came up through improv and sketch at UCB in New York, started stand-up after moving to Los Angeles in 2009, and spent the 2010s on other people's programmes: Kroll Show (2013–2015), where he wrote and supervised; New Girl, which he joined for its later years, 2016 to 2018; and Big Mouth (2017–2025), where he wrote, rose through the producing ranks and voiced Caleb and a succession of hormone monsters. New Girl is a series we recommend warmly, for its friendships rather than its romantic plotting, and it is one where no single writer's hand shows. That is how a good room works, and it is also why a room writer's first solo outing is worth watching closely.

Kevin was seven years in the making while he was still on Big Mouth, drawn in part from a cat he and Plaza once shared, and by his own account the lesson he carried across was to ground a raunchy world in a “strong sense of heart”. It is the right lesson. The odd thing about Kevin is that it applies it one half at a time. The early episodes are the raunch, slack and only fitfully funny, with the improviser's habit of running a bit past the point where it was working. The heart arrives late and almost apologetically, as if the programme had been waiting to be sure we would not leave.

When it does arrive it is real. The later episodes moved us more than four episodes of cat filth had led us to expect, because the series finally settled on the one subject it understood: what an animal knows about the people it lives with, and cannot tell them. That is a good subject for a comedy and a better one for Wengert, whose writing is kinder than his jokes.

If there is a second series, it should begin where the first one eventually got to, with the cat watching and the gross-out waiting its turn. We would come back for that. We would not sit through the first four episodes again to reach it.