Crazy Ex-Girlfriend wrapped its four-year run last night…
The final episode did a pretty decent job of saying farewell to Rebecca Bunch and her friends, and the concert afterwards was a nice celebration.
I won’t lie, I was increasingly disappointed in the show over the last two seasons. For me, what began as such an audacious and wonderfully rude show, loaded with snarky musical numbers, became too focused on Rebecca’s mental health and a little too preachy for its own good.
All that therapy-speak about “getting help” and “doing the work”, along with a hyper-woke feminism and gender correctness, just seemed to smother all the dark comedy. So much of what made the show work was Rebecca being wildly inappropriate and selfish. With the subversive wit ironed out, she and the other characters were left with nothing to do but stand around and be nice to each other, blandly spout exposition. The jokes dried up.
Even worse, the CW seemed to radically slash their production budget, taking them from Broadway show/MTV parody-level glitz all the way down to bare-bones college sketch show. Every week there was less and less music, and what was there was less inspired, more cursory. The creators were clearly exhausted. And who can blame them? They wrote a total of 157 songs over the last 4 years! The novelty of the format was gone. It was time to call it a day.
It was no surprise that in the end Rebecca Bunch discovered her true love was musical comedy and chose it over the three guys who (somewhat unrealistically) were pining and competing for her. It was the message of self-actualization the series had been pushing since the end of Season 2. Like her creator, she realizes songwriting is a way to drive the voices from her head and replace an unhealthy obsession with a creative one, an outlet for her vivid imagination.
(Although the conceit that all the musical numbers were in her head doesn’t jibe with all the songs sung by other characters without her even being present…but who’s nitpicking? I don’t think the songs need any “explanation” at all.)
It may be a bit disingenuous to say she can’t pursue her talent and date someone at the same time – after all, Rachel Bloom is married in real life – but they had so neutered the male characters over the course of the season there was no real chemistry to act on anyway. We didn’t much care anymore. But again, I get it, that was sort of the point. In the last scene, standing onstage at a nightclub filled with her friends, she says she came to West Covina to find love…and she did – she loves everyone in the room. A nice touch that brings it full circle.
Then, after a full hour of build-up, she finally sits down at a keyboard to play us “a song I wrote”, and before she can strike a single note the show ends right there – like Tony Soprano eating an onion ring – giving us no big musical climax, no cathartic payoff after four years. Instead, they just cut to the live concert where the cast reprised old songs for a packed audience of fans.
It felt like a cop-out, like they were limping over the finish line…
If ever a series deserved a big finish, this was it.
But I guess the real miracle is that the series ever existed to begin with. What Bloom and her collaborators achieved (including Adam Schlesinger, the prodigy behind the band Fountains Of Wayne and Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do) was something nobody else has ever done before on television and is not likely to happen again: they produced a quality musical sitcom with catchy, clever original numbers and big laughs week after week after week.
And they did it on sheer talent and force of will, all the while fighting low ratings and the hovering CW axe. Not a small feat.
So, well done, Becks.
In memory, here are my choices for the Top Ten Songs that highlight the series at its very best… (Only two hours from the beach!)
You can’t beat the very first number, “West Covina” – it set the tone for everything that followed: edgy but exhilarating, knowing but full of goofy unabashed joy and pure showmanship. Not to mention that pretzel lift at the end…
This quickie about the lasting psychological effects of being unpopular in school was an instant classic. Never fails to make me laugh.
This was wonderfully giddy satire – a parody of inspirational songs.
This second-year title song was the best ear-worm of the series.
This one takes the title as biggest, most elaborate production number – Rebecca’s take on Marilyn Monroe’s “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend”.
I think this is the sweetest/sexiest thing Rachel Bloom ever wrote –
She never failed to push the raunch envelope, but always in a fun way. Hard to believe she got away with these two songs on TV –
Being my musical era, I had to love this disco tribute (and Soul Train homage) –
And finally, from Season 3, this wicked and perfectly realized version of a 60’s girl-group song about Rebecca’s slightly evil mom –