Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

I'm late to the party here, but I'm glad I came.

As someone who is not where he wishes he was professionally, I do have a certain jealousy toward people who have passed through similar orbits as mine and gone on to do respected, famous work. Renaissance man Donald Glover, for instance, was in the same department as me at Tisch (though I think three years ahead, so if I met him, it was only in passing during my freshman year.) Anyway, add Rachel Bloom to the list of super-talented people who went to school with me (though I think she was in the acting program) of whom I am super-jealous but also vaguely proud (not that I ever knew her personally.) And the fact that she's a year younger... oh hell, it's not a healthy way to think about those things.

So speaking of unhealthy ways of thinking about things (all that was totally just a segue and totally not a confession of a real problem I have...):

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a show co-created, executive produced, and starring Rachel Bloom. It is about a successful New York lawyer named Rebecca Bunch who abandons her life there to move to West Covina, California (an LA suburb) after discovering that her summer camp boyfriend from her teenage years Josh Chan lives there.

Rebecca is a conundrum, full of contradictions. She is well-meaning, but she has deep-rooted problems that drive her to utterly absurd and sometimes criminal lengths. In fact, her pursuit of Josh Chan is, well, stalking.

But this show is deeply empathetic. In fact, the show's premise is all about subverting its title, which the opening theme (more on music in a moment) calls out as a sexist term. Actually, I think a lot of the early marketing sort of leaned in to the sexist portrayal of Rebecca that the show is ultimately about subverting.

So not only do we see where Rebecca's coming from, and ultimately want what's best for her (which I'm thinking at the end of season one is for her to take some time not trying to be in a relationship at all and working on standing on her own two feet) but we also see how every character is messed up in their own ways.

Greg, Josh's best friend who is presented through much of the season as a far more viable romantic interest for Rebecca, is himself a big pile of problems, such as his affected apathy which is actually a way to cover up for his fear of failure (as long as he doesn't try, he can convince himself that if he was trying he'd succeed in every endeavor, something that does ring a few familiar bells for this blogger.) Paula, Rebecca's new best friend and Josh-stalking enabler, is so obsessed with living through Rebecca's delusions vicariously that she winds up being kind of terrifying, all because her own life is so mundane and dull.

And even Josh, who is so idealized in Rebecca's mind, is messed up in his own ways. He's in denial about the fact that he's an adult, so focused on retaining the comforts of his teenage years - sticking with his high school girlfriend (who domineers him) and insisting on keeping his other relationships in a blissful stasis.

In the first season we do already see some positive movements - Rebecca's new boss, for instance, realizes he's bisexual (and man, how often do you see a male bisexual character on a network TV show?) and seems to mostly come out of the season in a better place than where he started. For all of Rebecca's hurricane-like effect on her social circle in West Covina, the net effect might actually wind up being a positive.

And in the midst of all this character drama, we have an incredibly funny show that is also a musical.

Rachel Bloom made a name for herself doing viral music videos on YouTube, and is a huge musical theater nerd, and the show's cast is filled with Broadway veterans. So what we get are some inspired music numbers - about one or two an episode - that are often the funniest part of a very funny show (also sometimes the most devastating, like a number called "You Stupid Bitch.) This show is all about subversion, so for example, in the first episode there's a number called "The Sexy Getting Ready Song" in which the rapper who comes in at the bridge realizes how absurdly complicated and painful the process is for women to conform to our society's standards of beauty that he has a serious moment of reflection and then spends the end-of-episode tag calling up women he's dated and apologizing for perpetuating the patriarchal double-standards.

The music is kinda-sorta explained as Rebecca's imagination (we hear her singing "for real" occasionally and let's just say Rebecca is not Rachel Bloom) except that if that's the case, the other characters must do the same thing.

I've got to confess: while I was absolutely a theater kid in high school, I wasn't much of a musical theater fanatic. I was never one to listen to musical theater scores as my primary listening music (I think I had the soundtrack to Urinetown, but it wasn't a go-to CD like Californication.) But I tend to love people who love musical theater, and this show is so clever with its musical numbers that I can't help but enjoy them.

Obviously there's a lot more left to the show that I haven't seen (there's a whole season two on Netflix that I haven't watched yet,) but the characters are so well-drawn, the writing so clever, and the performances so fantastic that I'm eager to see more.