Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
On last night's episode, Rebecca decided to throw a party so that she could hang out with Josh, which led to the revelation that her dad left her mom while she was having a party, that her best friend/coworker Paula has a son who suffers from like seven different developmental disorders, and that, as a child, one of Rebecca's friends was simply known as "Girl with Mustache." All of this—the dark stuff and the overtly farcical—is treated with the same breeziness. This is a musical, so no one is trying to hold a mirror up to reality here—the show sublimates between whimsy and grimness in a way that isn't quite like anything else on TV.Another, more nuanced bit of evidence that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a brilliant show comes in its treatment of West Covina, a city that despite being 19 miles east of my home in Los Angeles I didn't know existed until Crazy Ex-Girlfriend told me that it did. It is a city so unremarkable that its Wikipedia page—which one would presume was written, or at least minded, by someone who deeply cares about it and wants others to care deeply about it too—can only boast that it's a "center for malls, shops, movie theaters, restaurants, and diversity." Rebecca, who hails from a small town, serves to mock the sort of high achievers who view New York as the only city in the universe. She's intense, because New York and her Ivy League education have made her that way. It's a fish-out-of-water situation, if the fish got out of the water to evolve into a nuclear-powered shark, then jumped back in the water. The efficiency and speed that allowed Rebecca to barely survive in New York give her ample time to obsess over the smallest, most minuscule details of her life in California's 62nd most-populous city.Problem is, the show's humor feels too specialized to survive in a network environment, and its marketing may have doomed what chance it had to catch on with the sort of pop-culture obsessed crowd who might have warmed to it. Let's hope that when its run is inevitably cut short, Netflix will pick it up.Follow Drew on Twitter.