NEW YORK — How the ham sandwich is Ellie Kemper like Kimmy Schmidt?
For starters, she's just as gosh-darn, mommy-fudging cheerful as her perma-smiling character, who's rescued from a doomsday cult and moves to New York City in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, returning to Netflix Friday for a second season. But unlike Kimmy, she hasn't started replacing swear words with lunch foods yet.
"That hasn’t carried over into my real life as much as wanting foods that you want when you're an adolescent," says Kemper, sitting in her dressing room on Kimmy's Brooklyn set. "Peanut butter and jelly and chocolate milk — I've really been craving those now. Also, brighter colors have snuck into my wardrobe, which is nice. It enhances your mood."
Kimmy is the zany, joke-dense brainchild of 30 Rock creators Tina Fey and Robert Carlock. The show was initially slated for NBC, until the network got cold feet and sold it to Netflix just as filming was completed. It was a gamble that paid off for the streaming giant: In July, Kimmy earned seven Emmy Award nominations including best comedy series, and has since become a social-media phenomenon, thanks in part to eccentric (and highly quotable) characters played by Broadway veterans Tituss Burgess 
and Carol Kane.
When it launched last March, "it was almost like an opening night, where you're like, 'We created this for you, we hope you like it,' " says 30 Rock alum Jane Krakowski, back this year as Jacqueline Voorhees, a self-absorbed socialite who's Kimmy's former employer. "When people responded to it, we were like, 'Oh, great, people got what we were going for.' So starting Season 2, it was like coming back with a high five, like, 'Yes, let's do this.' "
Although they no longer need to worry about network censors, Carlock and Fey say Kimmy is still the same sunny, occasionally dark comedy, only with slightly longer episodes. In the season opener, Kimmy is trying to start fresh after sending her captor (guest star Jon Hamm) to prison, but quickly learns that it's not so easy to forget her 15 years trapped underground.
"She's digging deeper this year," Fey says. "For a long time, she was like, 'I got it! I'll just smile my way through it!' Then some things come up that she's like, 'OK, I gotta deal with some things,' which leads to some really good stories," as she searches for a new job, relationship — and later in the season — her estranged mother.
"There's a constant reminder that she's been through something horrific, and just like everyone else on the planet, you have to keep living your life taking into account the bad things," Kemper says. "She's so determined to put her bunker days behind her that it's just not plausible. That's sort of what Kimmy has been dealing with this season, maybe a little bit differently than in the first."
