If Greg sometimes felt like the alternate protagonist of season one, Paula is the stealth alternate protagonist, and that’s all-too appropriate given that her arc is about emergence and actualization, and a womanhood many people experience and embody. Of the many spotlights shone by Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, this one may be the most unexpected, and overdue. … More Paula With a Thousand Faces | Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Analysis

You can’t explain a joke because that ruins it. That’s logical and simple, but it’s also very powerful, and actually has far-reaching implications, especially in regards to how comedy ages. Even if I don’t agree with it, I understand the temptation to think we’re not moving in a direction, as a society. Things are lost, but there could be ways to hold onto what the outdated parts of ourselves appreciate. … More The New Comedy

In the mid-2010s, a revolutionary creative duo was born when the award-winning writer Aline Brosh McKenna discovered the comedy music videos of Rachel Bloom. And the script McKenna had in her back pocket at that time was for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a feature film she thought would be perfect for Bloom, considering most of those videos up to that point were about bringing violence and instability to romantic comedy. So this is a crucial moment not only for either woman but for television itself. The ingredients to make it so are McKenna, who’s navigated to the top of a system that works so well when it’s working against her and those like her, the idea for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend the movie, female-led and female-featuring, and Bloom, the quadruple-threat and counting with a completely new voice, and whose teaming up with McKenna turns a writer’s natural introspection into a dialogue. … More The Endgame is You

“Wow, I really underestimated this show,” is probably a thought I should only have once. But alas, and believe me, it’s only because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a TV show, and generally, my expectations for a TV show are at least: this will be a TV show. And with dribbly phrases like
“golden era” and “peak TV” ubiquitous in television criticism, we know shows have experimented and pushed past old expectations for the medium. But this is different. … More Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Season 3 Recap

“Moments,” though? An arbitrary quantity in the realm of media criticism, which will, damn you, have little to do with arbitrary, bet. Well, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a television show that really rises above. … More 13 Great Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Moments

In high school, I had a conversation with a friend and I can’t remember what we were talking about, but it must’ve been about gender relations somehow, as often came up between two awkward teenagers finding their voices. And we reached a moment where she said, “Look, at some point, you can’t know my experience, my life,” and that’s something that I feel like everybody hears or has to hear, especially as the armchair liberals we become scrolling through Twitter. … More We Are All Rebecca Bunch

Let’s talk about Josh Chan. Now, Josh Chan is an incredible character for reasons within and without the context of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I really like watching him do stuff, and I really like Rebecca do stuff around him. There was a video a while back called “Was It Supposed to Be Greg?” which had gone through several iterations since before the channel started, and at one point was more a discussion about Team Greg and Team Josh. So I guess now we have occasion to revisit that other part of it, but first note that of course teams is not the way to go about this. … More Josh Chan and the Slanted Gaze

When Rachel Bloom talks about Darryl, one of the things I feel like she points out is that he’s a very lonely character who has this fundamental sadness and of course didn’t know why until meeting White Josh. As we see, he’s on a kind of desperate quest to be friends with someone. On paper, that sounds pretty tragic, but like Rebecca, he’s just too sunny to bring the tone of the show down. … More Darryl and Friends | Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Analysis

Media analysis can be rough, when you dig really deep you got to make sure you remember how and why you got there. This YouTube channel started under a simple banner: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is so good and so smart. But it’s been a few months since I was initially struck by the show’s unexpected good and smartness, “unexpected” measured not by a show that looks like this but by television itself, and in the time since, I’ve witnessed various negativity — one scathing review, a number of issues raised by the fan community, things like that. … More Crazy Ex-Girlfriend | Issues to Address

I love this episode because it exists both within and without, so meaningfully, very much a part of its own arc as the setup to the final arc, then becoming essential to the season, and yet also as a singular experience which feels unique even in the context of an endlessly inventive series. … More Sitcom’s End | Crazy Ex-Girlfriend #206 Analysis