Bloom’s Day
Manhattan Beach native Rachel Bloom has a hit with TV’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”
In his poem “New Hampshire,” Robert Frost tells of meeting a Californian who extols the Golden State’s virtues. The climate is so good, the Californian insists, that no one ever dies of natural causes. Instead, “Vigilance Committees/Had to organize to stock the graveyards/And vindicate the state’s humanity.”
Frost crystallized, without necessarily endorsing, the tendency of East Coast intellectuals to look down on California. (He was was born in San Francisco.) Life, the right-coasters say, is about doom and gloom; sun and satisfaction are really just covers for stupidity and shallowness.
Rachel Bloom once thought this way, too. The Manhattan Beach native is the star and co-creator of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” a difficult-to-categorize series currently streaking through its first season on the CW. (The network renewed the show for a second season last month.) Bloom attended Mira Costa High School and found an outlet in the school’s drama program, but it didn’t change how out of place she felt growing up in the South Bay. She moved to New York for college, and felt for a while like she was home.
“I had thoughts of anxiety, I wanted to read dark poetry,” Bloom said in an interview. “In Manhattan Beach, there wasn’t a word for unhappiness. Then I got to New York, and unhappiness is part of the culture.”
Happiness and the lack of it is the big idea behind “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” Bloom plays Rebecca Bunch, a young associate logging long days and sleepless nights at a white shoe New York law firm. In the midst of an existential crisis on the streets of Manhattan, she bumps into Josh Chan, an old flame from a youthful summer camp romance, for whom she still pines. Josh is feeling beaten down by the Big Apple, and shares with Rebecca his plan to return to his home town of West Covina. In a moment of either insanity or inspiration, Rebecca quits her job and resolves to move there, too.
Mention of the San Gabriel Valley suburb prompts a geography lesson for Rebecca, who hails from New York’s Westchester County. West Covina, Josh explains, is only two hours from the beach. (Four with traffic.) Stumbling through an attempt to explain to Rebecca the draw of the place, Josh is ultimately able only to say that people are “happy” there.
Rebecca’s decision to move to West Covina is puzzling to almost every other character in the show. Her new coworkers at the provincial law firm Whitefeather and Associates wonder what kind of person would leave a prestigious job in New York. Josh’s friends greet her arrival with a suspicion that betrays resentment of their hometown. And Rebecca’s shrill, meddling mother complains ceaselessly during a visit to her daughter, asking, “What is so good about California?”
Bloom plays Rebecca Bunch, a lawyer who relocates from New York to West Covina. Photo Eddie Chen
Sing along
When I interviewed Bloom, she was in the midst of a “For your consideration” campaign for Emmy nominations. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” has earned widespread critical acclaim, garnering praise from outlets including The New Yorker. Earlier this year Bloom won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a musical or comedy series.
“Musical or comedy” actually sums up the series pretty well. Unlike most 30-minute sitcoms, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” runs a full hour and it makes use of the extra time by incorporating at least two songs into every episode.
When I began watching the show, what struck me initially was how ambitious the musical numbers were. Almost all feature choreographed dancing, and some have dozens of extras. It seemed like a lot of extra work.
But the more I watched, the more it became apparent that songs offer a kind of storytelling economy not available through narration or dialogue.
“I’ve always thought that songs were some of the most efficient forms of getting us into a character’s head,” Bloom said. “It’s almost like you’re writing an essay. The hook of the song is the essay’s thesis statement and every verse is a body paragraph.”
The songs employ a staggering variety of popular music subgenres in service of character arcs. Like soliloquies in a Shakespeare play, they provide a dramatic space to explore socially objectionable feelings: Rebecca does a bling-encrusted rap about manipulating parents into approving of her; Josh’s friend Greg, believing Rebecca’s heart lies elsewhere, uses a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers routine to urge Rebecca to “Settle for Me.”
Bloom studied musical theater at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts. She led the school’s Hammerkatz improv comedy group, and got involved with the city’s prestigious Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theater. But after graduating from college, her boyfriend, now her husband, was moving to Los Angeles. Bloom knew she wanted to write and perform her own material, but faced a choice. She could stay in New York and work through the ranks of Upright Citizen’s Brigade, hoping to attract attention and obtain representation that way. Or she could move back to Southern California.
Part of her hesitation about returning was rooted in her feelings of not belonging while growing up. During college, a classmate at NYU mentioned wanting to return to Silver Lake, which Bloom had never heard of. On finding out it was in Los Angeles, she recoiled with ready-made assumptions about Southern California.
Bloom now counts herself a Silver Lake resident and has a “more nuanced” vision of what Southern California has to offer.
“My relationship with L.A. is pretty different to how I felt growing up here,” Bloom said. “My show embraces L.A., the happiness of it, and the sunniness of it.”
These feelings are perfectly captured in a song done inside that quintessential L.A. location, an outdoor mall. Without a touch of irony, Rebecca revels in the ways Christmas looks different here than it does in New York: “It’s 100 degrees, this elf is Vietnamese/That’s the way that California does it.”
Original songs play a role in every episode of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” Photo by Smalls & Raskind.
TV with purpose
At one point “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” was going to fill a half-hour slot on Showtime. The deal with the premium cable network fell through and the CW Network stepped in.
“We thought we were a dead show when we sold a pilot to CW, who happened to be looking for a pairing for ‘Jane the Virgin,’ another prestige piece. That was luck,” Bloom said.
She has high praise for the network and the creative freedom it allows her. She also appreciates the way broadcast enables her to reach a wider audience. Bloom is endowed with a sense of responsibility to the viewer that seems borrowed from a time when TV shows addressed topical issues with “A Very Special Episode.”
“Even though we’re not the most appropriate show, we’re still a network show, kids and teens can watch us,” Bloom said “Knowing that 13-year-old girls can watch and learn about body image and love and what’s it realistically like dating, that’s so cool and important to me.”
The result is a program with frank treatment of money issues, a cast as diverse as anything out there right now, and a much-praised portrayal of female sexuality.
Most impressively, the show not afraid to turn its critical gaze on the people who likely make up the core of its audience: college-educated, city-dwelling denizens of the upper middle class. There is the casual abuse of attention deficit disorder drugs. Social media is omnipresent. A character laments, “I know it’s not cool to believe in God.” Mentioning the word “cab” yields blank stares, while Übers are everywhere.
In this sense, relocating from New York to West Covina can see like an act of quiet rebellion against the monotony of urban, millennial culture that the show frequently needles. When we spoke, Bloom told me how she had been travelling around the country doing live renditions of songs and jokes from the show. She was struck by how much commonality she found between audiences everywhere from New York to Dallas.
“I went to Iowa City, and it felt like a little Portland,” she said. “Hipsters are hipsters.”
Southern California may seem a strange base from which to launch such an attack. The show frequently pokes fun at the way in Los Angeles’ suburbs seem to blend together, namechecking every municipality it can: Azusa, Burbank, Glendora, Monrovia, and “all three El Montes” get shout outs.
But unlike the character she plays, Bloom is a Southern California native. She has, she points out, actually been to Raging Waters. It gives her a kind of authority to make jokes — and insights — others cannot.
“Most of the people I know now are East Coast transplants. I don’t know why, but you get relatively few born-and-raised Southern California people who then go into show business,” she said. “The show has given me a sense of Southern California pride that I didn’t have before.”
Bloom as Rebecca Bunch and Santino Fontana as Greg Serrano. Photo by Greg Gayne
Made for the times
Bloom came to fame at an auspicious time for comedy. Far more than music or literature, which labor under the diminishing returns of Spotify and Amazon, humor seems liberated by the Internet. Short, easy-to-produce sketches blur the lines between establishment outfits like Funny or Die and upstarts like Derrick Comedy (which came out of NYU’s Hammerkatz).
One of the first such sketches to expose the potential of the format was “Lazy Sunday” a song from comedy troupe Lonely Island, performed on “Saturday Night Live” by Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell.
“I remember when I saw ‘Lazy Sunday,’ it blew my mind,” Bloom said. “I hadn’t seen musical comedy done like that. South Park was probably the closest thing.”
At the time, Bloom was looking for comedic songs to use in auditioning for plays. Almost all of what she found came from the ‘40s and ‘50s. Comedy, she felt, had to catch up with the times.
“Lonely Island changed SNL, because they brought in modern comedic sensibility to a form that was outdated,” Bloom said.
The other side to this uncoupling of humor from traditional strictures, however, is the rise of what I would call comedy-without-consequences. There is a growing tendency among millennial humorists, due at least in part to the success of “Family Guy,” to lean hard on the random and the obscure. Jokes land outside the confines of both plot and setting; if you laugh, it’s not because of anything you have learned about the characters or their world. (That this style is no longer daring or avant garde is evident from the way it is featured so prominently in not just programming but advertising — think Terry Crews’ Old Spice ads, or Blake Griffin spots for carmaker Kia.) The result is a cheap thrill that leaves the viewer increasingly uninvested in the emotional path of the characters.
“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” indulges every now and then. But “invested” is precisely the feeling Bloom has achieved. The show succeeds not because it serves up an assembly line of cleverly concealed dirty jokes, but because you care what happens to Rebecca and the rest. It exists in that narrow space of narrative art in which momentum is generated by something other than just plot.
When I asked Bloom what she imagined Rebecca’s life in New York was like before the events of the first episode, she thought for a moment, then gave me an impressively detailed response, delineating the character’s cleaning habits and Tinder activity. The conclusion, though, was that Rebecca’s struggle was that of someone not yet trying to change her life for the better.
“She’s someone who has never explored what she actually wants out of life,” Bloom said. “She forgot that being happy was important.”
And despite all the changes in technology, watching someone discover this still makes for captivating television. In one episode, Paula, a paralegal at Whitefeather, explains to her husband that she has been spending time helping Rebecca try to reunite with Josh because Paula believes so strongly in what Rebecca is trying to do. She is “addicted” to Rebecca’s love.
In a world in which people talk ceaselessly of “binge-watching” TV shows, the viewer can relate.
‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ airs Mondays at 8 p.m. on the CW. The show is also available on iTunes, and the last five episodes are on Hulu.