100 Favorite Shows: #84 — Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
“I have no underlying issues to address. I’m certifiably cute and adorably obsessed!”
Created by Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend helped return the musical genre to prominence on television. Granted, the ratings for the hybrid musical-romance-comedy-drama were some of the most abysmal in the history of television, but the critical reception was rapt and the fans were fervent. Thanks to their support, president of The CW Mark Pedowitz’s confidence, and a lucrative streaming deal with Netflix, the series about Bloom’s Rebecca Bunch character, who uprooted her entire life in the name of love, was able to close out four full seasons from 2015 to 2019 before eventually ending the show on its own terms.
(Sunny, little spoilers lie ahead for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend!)
In the era of John Landgraf’s “Peak TV,” there are a few different types of series that you can expect to receive big cable or streaming launches. A big-budget fantasy series trying to be the next Game of Thrones, a miniseries based on some major historical event, a prestige adaptation of a novel that hems and haws over having a second season. And, of course, there is the semi-autobiographical series built around a comedian’s persona.
You know, there’s Pete Holmes’ Crashing, Aidy Bryant’s Shrill, Pamela Adlon’s Better Things. It’s become a genre unto itself, way more than it ever did with Seinfeld or The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air back in the ’90s. These shows can range in quality from mediocre to pretty decent, but none of them ever seem to eclipse the ceiling prescribed to the genre. On some level, it comes across like they’re all hitting the same notes. That’s why it’s much better, in my taste, to build a show around a comedian and come up with an original idea for it. Barry is a Bill Hader vehicle, but it’s also a riveting series about a hitman. Atlanta is all for Donald Glover, but it’s one of the most high-concept comedies on television. To me, creative concepts are just more appealing than the slice-of-life dramedy style.
That’s why I give a lot of credit to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It could’ve just been a show about looking for love in all the wrong places built around the online persona of Rachel Bloom. Instead, Bloom ratcheted it up a level to make it a character study/musical/reflection on mental illness. The tone — emblematic of The CW’s patented, youth-oriented vibes — was sweet and bouncy on the surface with simplicity that masked the sinister, creepy, and more psychological aspects of the show.
Season one began with an exclamation point after every episode title. Season two sported a question mark. Season three came with periods. Season four featured no punctuation at all. Not only does this show Bloom’s four-year plan for a show that probably couldn’t have justified another season, but it also showed the steady deterioration of the Rebecca Bunch character before she eventually arrived at a state of mind that was more at peace and less in need of putting a label on everything in her life.
Throughout the run of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, every episode (and every song) aimed to reconcile one aspect of Bunch’s life. Her complicated relationship with her mother and her faith (with the song, “Remember That We Suffered”), her body confidence (“Heavy Boobs”), her lack of focus on her career (“JAP Battle”). In tackling these subjects, the early stages of the show are as light as the cartoon sunglasses-sporting star in the season one intro. Big smiles! Bright colors! West Covina! Everything was sunny and perfect and simple because we’d seen this kind of show before. Rebecca would learn how to become a better person and eventually marry Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III) and live happily ever after and we’d have some laughs along the way.
From the jump, though, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was always something deeper. (As the lyrics said, yes, it was much more nuanced than that.) This was reflected in the treatment of characters, who were always written from a place of honesty. In some cases, they were also written from a place of subversion. Most shows like this would have treated Rebecca’s friend, Paula (Donna Lynne Champlin), and boss, Darryl (Pete Gardner), as supporting players meant to aid Bunch on her own journey. Instead, they received their own arcs and their own quests for love, peace, and happiness, rather than just being supporting characters in “The Rebecca Story.”
Paula learns to become more in touch with her younger, more ambitious self and to distance herself from the dangers of matching Rebecca’s obsession with Josh (her benign remark, “The dance we do,” when she ignores Rebecca’s protests was a hysterical way to begin the easing up of their scheming). Darryl learns to become more confident in his work and in his desire for a family. (Perfect mechanisms to set him down the path to self-actualization? His stress eating of jelly beans and forced confusion of “big clients” versus “pig clients” in “Will Scarsdale Like Josh’s Shayna Punim?” This comes after Nathaniel (Scott Michael Foster) becomes the new law boss, of course.) Both of them are able to better themselves at a distance from Rebecca.
Based on the projected thesis of the show, Rebecca is crazy. The title, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, however, is a classic adage that is frequently used to trivialize the emotions of former lovers. A way to demean or discredit women who dare to feel, it’d be easy to peg Rebecca as a “crazy ex-girlfriend,” considering the effort she puts into endearing herself to Josh, a man she barely knows and projects her desire for being loved onto. The title, however, is as subversive as the abundance of attention the supporting characters receive. Yes, it’s easy to label Rebecca as “crazy,” but it’s more nuanced than that. She experiences intense bouts of stress, anxiety, BPD, and depression, often all at once. “Crazy” shouldn’t be a catch-all for this behavior and the show never treated it as such.
Instead, Rebecca undergoes the expected character arc for someone in her position. Having practically thrown all her hopes for the future into the Josh Chan basket, Rebecca has a few moments of clarity where she tries to save herself from herself. In “Josh’s Sister Is Getting Married!,” she tries to distance herself from Josh and she takes the blame for Paula when an image of Josh’s girlfriend, Valencia (Gabriella Ruiz), in Josh’s sister’s (Tess Paras) wedding dress pops up on Valencia’s Instagram. It seems like Rebecca is genuinely pushing forward and moving past her neurotic behavior, but by this point in the first season, Rebecca has shown a tendency to repeat her mistakes. No fan thought this time would be any different.
For Rebecca, it was three steps forward and, like, six steps back. At the end of this episode, Rebecca quits her pursuit of Josh and instead kisses Greg (Santino Fontana and, later, Skylar Astin), who can’t help but reference a “dusty potato” during the kiss. Ten episodes don’t even pass before Rebecca is back in the Josh realm, but the evidence was always there. Rebecca’s behavior is cyclical and her love for Josh extended to Josh’s family (including the delightful Amy Hill of 50 First Dates fame) and she could never really let go.
Honestly, it was pretty easy to love Josh. An impossibly forgiving person with commitment issues and an easygoing, friendly personality, Josh hit it off with everyone he met (including Rebecca’s former lover, David, who called Rebecca “Mom” during sex). Rodriguez’s performance is understated and delightful because he has to play clueless, distant, and accessible all at once. He nails it so well that it’s easy to forget Josh’s depiction as an object of Rebecca’s strongest desires in the early going of the show.
It also makes him much more sympathetic when Rebecca eventually makes the full transition into “scorched earth” Rebecca when he leaves her at their eventual altar. After all, it was a necessary evil to get Rebecca to finally follow the thread left at her therapist’s office when she was an inch away from the revelation that before she can love another, she had to work through her own mental illness. The abandoned altar was obviously a long time coming. From the outset of their relationship (christened on Facebook, Waze, and Draw Something), Rebecca was hellbent on convincing herself that uprooting her life was the right thing to do for Josh. A couple of the social media generation, their happiness was stowed away in favor of hashtags and forced commitments (another song marks this: the Soul Train-inspired “We’ll Never Have Problems Again”). They needed to separate for her to realize her issues were not with romance. (“He’s not a human being; he’s Josh Chan” presents impossible standards immediately.)
This midway point of the series helped get Rebecca to the point of understanding that she could not make everyone happy and that it was unfair to expect the people she loved to be perfect. However, it also helped set the show down the path of bringing Greg back into the fold of the series.
Greg was easily my favorite character throughout the first season, partly because he was played by the talented Fontana and partly because he was one of my favorite types of characters (the cynic with a big heart — “I’m not a sourpuss. I’m pensive and deep.”). He sang the song from the show I remember most (“I Could If I Wanted To”), he found a way to sneak referring to Emory as the “Harvard of the south” (later hearkened back to when Cal State Northridge is said to be the “Harvard of Northridge”) into a multiple choice quiz, and he got turned on when others shushed him. He also had the most chemistry with Rebecca and seemed prime for a major arc on the show. That’s why it was so surprising when he departed early in the second season.
When he realizes it’s time to back off romantic pursuits by seeing a flirtation go south at the local grocery store, Greg shows more self-awareness than every other season one character combined. Because of this, he had to go to Emory. The other characters still had growing to do, but Greg had already matured. His arc was complete until the other characters grew with him. Only then could he be welcomed back to the series as a fully realized human being, rather than an object to bring joy to others. The show wasn’t the same without Greg and Astin later filling in for Fontana came with growing pains, but it showed that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was committed to its concept. It wasn’t just about musical numbers with the production value of a Rihanna video. It was also about letting characters go when it was best for their arcs, rather than when it was best for the series.
It’s no wonder then that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has become one of the more subtly influential shows of the past decade. (Do we have Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist without it? And even then, the songwriting from Bloom and Adam Schlesinger was all original and never jukebox.) It became one of the few series to receive regular check-ins from NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour gang because it was the perfect pillar of dynamic television. If you wanted a comfort show, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend could be that. If you wanted a profound meditation on oft-glossed over subjects, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend could be that, too. It was The CW’s most fully-realized series of all-time and an immediate hit for Bloom, who won an acting Golden Globe after the show’s first season. And for as much fun as it was, it also taught me to be okay with a bit of self-deprecation from time to time. After all, “Je suis garbage.”
