As I write these words, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” the musical-theatre television comedy starring and co-created by Rachel Bloom, is halfway through its final season. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” remains effervescent and lovable. In Season 4, Rebecca Bunch is mending torn relationships and deprogramming bad habits after she was diagnosed with borderline-personality disorder, attempted suicide, and spent six weeks in jail. My colleague Emily Nussbaum, in her not-a-TV-top-ten-list-no-sir for 2018, distilled the challenge for the new episodes: “I admire the audacity of what it is trying to pull off,” she wrote, “which is to dramatize getting healthy.”
Getting healthy for Rebecca means entering into treatment for B.P.D., but “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” makes it clear that the situation is a lot more nuanced than that. Rebecca’s struggles have always transcended a medical diagnosis. Recovery, for her, entails thinking critically about the tropes she’s absorbed from musical theatre, fairy tales, and romantic comedies—these were the tropes that spurred her to move to West Covina, California, in the first place. As the series got off the ground, the influence of fiction was a plot engine, and it gave “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” with its fantastical song interludes, a zany charm. But, having come to terms with the full scope of the damage these narratives can do, Rebecca is now trying to chart a different way forward. This poses an interesting test for the show: “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” must craft a story line out of a woman learning to live outside of story lines.
In some ways, such a challenge represents a boon to the series. Rebecca learns that she has no special protagonist status—her friends and acquaintances are as real as she is. After deciding that practicing law is a living death, she opens “a small, unprofitable pretzel stand.” In jail, Rebecca pressures the women around her to sing their stories for a “Chicago”-inspired number, but the scheme comes to strike even her as ridiculous. She also discovers that she is allowed to live in her body and think her thoughts without referring back to an assortment of reductive female types. “Meet Rebecca. She’s too hard to summarize,” the updated theme song insists. Real life isn’t all bad.
But this new premise drags behind it a fishnet full of risks. Rebecca is supposed to be improving, but bad behavior is more fun to watch than good behavior. Healthy people don’t surround themselves with toxic people, so Rebecca’s core group—her friends Paula, Valencia, Heather, and Darryl; her exes Josh and Nathaniel—also have to mind their manners. The bigger issue is that what could be wincingly called Rebecca’s wellness journey is mostly an interior one. Her outward victories are modest: go on a road trip with a friend without fighting or getting too intense; leave your house when you’d rather hide. In general, dramatizations of growth can exude a sense of dutifulness and labor—a whiff of the after-school special. The best glimpses of Rebecca’s and others’ inner lives come through the songs, but more than one or two musical numbers per episode seems like an impossible lift.
Here’s my weird proposal: What if the final season of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” were a book? Listen, I love “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”! I’ve met Rachel Bloom. There are neurons in my brain that fizz with dopamine only when fictional lawyers from West Covina appear onscreen to spar verbally over a box of crullers. And yet, amid conversations about translating novels to television and the relative merits of each medium, I’ve grown convinced that “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” could rout any Season 4 bugaboos by transforming itself into written literature. The novel is currently wrestling with some of the same issues that preoccupy Rebecca. In her influential “Faye” trilogy, the author Rachel Cusk implies that the storyness of stories renders them unacceptably false—and thus useless. Cusk’s solution is to do away with plot and character. But other writers have hacked their own paths out of the labyrinth: via the studied spontaneity of autofiction (Sheila Heti), the remaking of inherited myths (Daisy Johnson), or the embrace of artifice (Kate Atkinson). Fiction offers Bloom multiple captivating ways to spin a narrative about breaking one’s addiction to narratives. (The screaming flaw of my proposal is that it would eliminate “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” ’s musical numbers. I don’t have a great defense, except to note that some novels come with their own soundtracks.)
Transposing the last season of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” into literature would also level the playing field between audience and character. On the show, we watch Rebecca struggle and blunder. She lies to her ice-queen mom about whether she is still a partner at her law firm—we brace for the teachable moment. The relationship between Rebecca’s perspective and our presumably wiser one can feel unfair, condescending. (A similar asymmetry pervades “The Good Place,” which asks viewers to examine human characters through celestial eyes; that show, too, is rescued by its sensibility.) Without a steadier flow of inner Rebecca-ness, one can lose sight of what makes the character brilliant.
What’s more, the experience of reading is one that plays to “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” ’s strengths. Literature excels at interiority, at canvassing the inside of a character’s head. The inside of Rebecca’s head is what makes her alluring. (She imagines humiliation as a place, a campy cemetery bristling with skeletons and dreamy black tulle.) In Episode 5 of the fourth season, Rebecca learns that Valencia is moving with her girlfriend to New York to pursue a professional opportunity; Heather, recently promoted at work, has bought her own condo, in El Segundo. “I see life as a contest, and I am now losing,” Rebecca confesses to her therapist. “I want to cryogenically freeze all my friends to buy me some time to find a better career and life partner.” Imagine if, instead of an announcement to her doctor, “My friends are all doing better than me” were the first line of a passage Rebecca were narrating. From there, she could riff on cryogenic freezing, or freezing her eggs, or the sisterly push-pull of “Frozen.” She could embroider an image, a memory; she could work up a metaphor. We know Rebecca has layers, because she unfolds them in her witty, peculiar, hallucinatory song sequences—the television equivalent of a stream of consciousness. Rebecca’s therapy session is unsubtle, contrived. But her book would be a knockout.
Sourse: newyorker.com
