TELEVISION

Shhh, ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ Was My Unexpected Guilty Pleasure

I wanted to hate it, but its frothy silliness was right up my alley

Photo by Dimmis Vart on Unsplash

It was quite possibly designed for me.

My young adulthood was exclusively focused on musical theater. My life was play, practice, more rehearsal and the next show! I’m a Gen-X gay guy. And yes, I do admire creativity and irreverence. Yet despite all this, I was convinced The CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019) was not for me.

No way, no how. It was probably beneath me, right? After all, I’m a “real” theater guy. I’m not “a CW-show” type of viewer. (You know what I mean!) Or maybe I was just a snob? Gilmore Girls, One Tree Hill, Supernatural, 7th Heaven, Veronica Mars — they were all so young, so female-skewing, all written to a particular demographic. Not me.

But then a year or so later, the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend seasons landed on Netflix. And call it a side effect of Covid quarantining, call it good marketing by the streaming platform or call it a tractor beam sent out to card-carrying gays, I watched the first episode… and was inexplicably charmed and intrigued.

It was low-brow. Formulaic. I didn’t want to like it. I shouldn’t have liked it. But it soon became my binge-watching guilty pleasure. Close the blinds. Shut the curtains. Nobody needs to know about this.

Credit: The CW (2015)

What’s your guilty pleasure?

Are you the snooty opera-lover who secretly binges Naked and Afraid or Hoarders? Perhaps you’re the surgeon sneaking home to catch the finale of Real Housewives, or you’re the esteemed university political science professor who was addicted to Saved By the Bell “back in the day.”

For a month or so there, mine was Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. All four seasons.

The premise was simple. Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) is a young lady who’s always been “a bit much,” and obsessive — that girl you enjoy but don’t necessarily want to be linked to. When she learns her ex Josh (Vincent Rodriguez III) is moving to Los Angeles and living in suburb West Covina, she vows to fix her life and fly across the country too (and who knows, side benefit, win him back).

But wait, she’s not moving for Josh, she’s not moving for a guy, hell, no!!

Rachel Bloom and the creators won me over and had me with the irreverent opening musical number. When your lead female is willing to show her neurotic self sitting at a West Covina strip club bar, self-talking/self-singing and justifying she’s not moving for Josh, all while a sexy female stripper squats in front of her, throws her hair and shakes her boobs in her face, finally breaking the singing spell, you know the creative team doesn’t take itself too seriously and this is going to be fun.

See what I mean —

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Such daring creativity. Yes, shows like Glee had plenty of musical numbers, but almost all were covers of already-famous songs. With Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the production team had the challenge of writing (and staging) two to four new songs and production numbers per episode. Yikes! Fun.

It was frothy and simple. Kind of surface-level. I liked it, I kept watching, feeling embarrassed and unsure.

After two or three episodes I found myself wondering, is the conceit enough to keep it interesting all season? Is there enough “meat?” Sure, Rebecca faces winning Josh back, squaring off against his new girlfriend Valencia and dealing with zany coworkers at her law firm job, but with only five to six main characters, how long can this be the main plot point?

Thankfully the creators seemed to recognize that potential issue. For example, the character of Paula (Donna Lynne Champlin) was probably originally envisioned as Rebecca’s bitchy office nemesis, but within an episode or two the creators wisely pivoted her to be our heroine’s truth-telling confidante and pillar of semi-stability through the series.

Thankfully the big networks gave a hard pass to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, as its ultimate place on cable permitted the show’s songs to lean into kink, f-bombs, inappropriate but honest takes on birth control, sperm, being bisexual, antidepressants, bad sex or bodily fluids, and all during a parody to The Music Man tune one moment and a Beyoncé video the next.

The show will not be everyone’s cup of tea.

It helps to have at least a passing reference to what trope or musical they may be emulating, be it Madonna, Ed Sheeran or a scene from La La Land, though I certainly missed plenty of them and still enjoyed their creative ways of not taking their art so seriously. Once I’d accepted I was indeed the middle-aged guy watching “a CW show,” I was able to name what kept bringing me back — the show’s groundbreaking artistic choices.

Our heroine is a shorter, flawed, full-figured woman. There’s literally a song about how she’s a woman with “heavy boobs” and multiple plot points and songs have to do with body image and her mental health.

Our hero Josh, the guy she’s shaken up her life for, is adorable Vincent Rodriguez III — cute, yes, but not Zac Efron, not your Caucasian CW Ken-in-a-box clone, but a guy of Filipino, Hispanic and Chinese background. It shouldn’t be, but this alone was viewed by the TV industry as daring and revolutionary, even for 2015.

Which — think about it — has to be freakin’ offensive to the Asian and Hispanic community. It was offensive. But the Asian-American community embraced it, recognizing Bloom and the show creators with awards for even considering minority representation and thinking outside the box. (It’s that rare that they have to throw a spotlight of glee on it when it happens).

I’m as open-minded as they come and I had to check my privilege when I found myself saying in the first episode, “Oh… him? He’s our leading man? The one she’s obsessed with?” Um yeah, in real life thousands of girls would fall in love with and obsess over just such a guy. It was so eye-opening, how I’d been conditioned (for decades) that our leading-character boys on shows must look like some mass-produced Ryan Gosling type.

Most intelligently, the show dared to lean heavily into the topic of mental health. Let’s speak some truth — our character Rebecca Bunch is what most would consider “a hot mess,” no doubt referred to as “crazy” throughout life. It’s in the title. After season one the creative team leaned fully into depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, the glee of actually receiving a diagnosis and owning being the woman who loves, loves, loves sex.

And all of this sung to creative, emotional tunes, often with a dance break or Josh Groban singing backup.

Having since read actress Rachel Bloom’s collection of essays, “I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are,” it’s clear that she has literally been quite the handful her entire life — that theater girl who’s a little too manic, a little too sexual, a little too needy. She’s good for a laugh and a good time, but do you want the responsibility of being her friend?

With incredible self-awareness, Bloom wisely brought all those difficult traits to our heroine as she grapples with insecurity, bad relationships and legit mental health challenges. All with quirky verve.

Oh Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I “wish I could quit you.” But somehow I was proud of this “little show that could,” the show that won Golden Globes and kept getting renewed despite low ratings and only a cult following.

Would I recommend it? I still don’t have the answer. (Check out the ending video with the variety of song genres to decide for yourself).

But Rachel Bloom is a woman I want to stand up and applaud. She is unabashedly her flawed self and for four seasons she changed the narrative on what qualified as a CW show’s lead female and male. Is she that improv and sketch-comedy girl who’s a little too loud at the bar, needs to be the center of attention and doesn’t know when to stop?

Probably.

But thankfully she doesn’t have to be your friend in real life. Or girlfriend. I’m more than happy to keep her as the crazy ex-girlfriend.

Now shhh, don’t tell anyone about this. I have a reputation to consider.

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©2026 Joe Guay | All Rights Reserved

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