How ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ Became TV’s Best Stalker Musical Comedy
You’ve probably seen the ads at a bus stop or on a billboard by now: A woman standing slack-jawed and murder-eyed in a hot pink dress, clutching the string of a heart-shaped balloon that’s threatening to sink back to earth. Beside it, in unhinged all-caps: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
It’s a loaded title, to be sure — one that carries the baggage of decades of vengeful, smoking-at-the-nostrils fictional females familiar from rom-coms and stalker flicks alike. (“Psycho Ex-Girlfriend” even has its own extensive entry under TV Tropes.) But far from adding another cardboard jilted lover to the archetype bonfire, the CW’s new hit series sets out to take an honest, irreverent and frankly feminist look at what happens to a smart, capable woman when love sends her over the deep end. Oh, and did we mention it’s also a musical.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend follow Rebecca Bunch (co-creator Rachel Bloom), a successful New York lawyer staring down an existential crisis. A chance encounter with her beaming, square-jawed high-school boyfriend, Josh (Vincent Rodriguez III), leads her to a drastic decision: It’s time to uproot her entire life and move to West Covina, the glamour-free inland California town where her ex-beau resides. Upon arrival, Rebecca performs an elaborate song-and-dance number involving scores of back-up dancers, singing billboards and a giant replica of a pretzel. But between soaring choruses straight out of Rodgers and Hammerstein, she furiously denies that she made the move for her long-lost teenage fling, or that there’s something more insidious brewing beneath her aggressively cheery denial — like, say, the beginnings of a serious nervous breakdown.
“We were interested in exploring the issue of: What are the biological things that love does to you, when it takes over the most intellectual parts of your brain?” Bloom says. “And I think the more intelligent you are, the more it drives you quote-unquote crazy, because you know you shouldn’t be feeling this way or doing these things.”
“She really came from our Id,” series co-creator Aline Brosh McKenna says of the character. “Women are sold this idea that love is the most important thing. Why does that become such a central preoccupation for an intelligent woman? And instead of questioning those things in a rational way, she just sort of explodes.”
McKenna and Bloom’s collaboration began in an unlikely way. In 2010, fresh from NYU’s musical theater program and having done work at the Upright Citizens Brigade, Bloom combined her love of song-and-dance and sketch comedy into a music video called “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.” The raunchy sci-fi ode went viral, and she became a minor Internet sensation; more videos (“Historically Accurate Disney Princess Song”; “I Steal Pets”) and two musical-comedy albums followed.