I was extremely soured by the show’s portrayal of West Virginia. I realize it’s a comedy, and I can take a joke about my home state if there is some tiny glimmer of a hint that the writers are aware of some complexity beneath the surface, or the damaging history of one-dimensional depiction in Appalachia. The show is over the top but, as you noted, it manages to show complexity between the cracks on certain issues. When it came to West Virginia, though, it just played on the same tired stereotypes — a man who sells his car for “opioids,” the gas station attendant who abandons his daughter and is on house arrest (and what about that attempt at an accent? that’s poor acting, comedy or not), the roomful of bar people who tell Kimmy and Titus to “move along” just by looking at them — and only warmed to them when Titus sang “Free Bird”, a town called Frackwater. The list goes on. Even the music seemed to be trying to be some kind of pastiche of Copland — whose Appalchian Spring had nothing to do with Appalachia but somehow defined its soundtrack for people who didn’t know any better — but with… you guessed it… banjos. Worst of all is that the state serves the only role it ever serves in popular media: it’s a place that is Other in every way. It’s incredible to me that a claim can be made that this show is progressive when it just repeats the same heinous, one-dimensional portrayal of a whole group of people that we rightfully cringe at when the stereotypes are race-based. Minstrelsy is not funny, and neither is this.