“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is, all at once, a darkly comic musical satire, a thoughtful exploration of mental illness, a subversion of the still-ubiquitous Prince Charming fantasy, a love letter to female friendship, and a deconstruction of — to risk overstating it — the entire female experience. For a lot of women, myself included, watching Crazy Ex-Girlfriend — the show, not just Bloom’s character — is like looking in a mirror. The show speaks to a Venn-diagrammable portion of the population — depressives, dramatics, anxious Jewish girls, irritatingly expressive theater kids, morbid nerds, people who cry at condiment ads — who’ve been consistently accused of too-much-ness, who’ve been commanded to rein it in since birth. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend rips off those reins, lights them on fire, and cackles wildly as the smoke rises. The first time I watched Bloom’s Rebecca negotiate a panic attack induced by a butter ad, I was hit with a greasy wave of self-recognition. Appropriately, then, Bloom says that the template for the show isn’t, say, Felicity or Sex and the City — Bloom hasn’t seen the former, and she still thinks it was “very socially irresponsible” for Carrie to end up with Big — but the moral crumbling of the blue-meth boys of Breaking Bad. “The show’s not called ‘Sane Lady Who Has It All Figured Out.’ We really loved the idea of exploring a person who’s never really sought happiness, only what other people have wanted from her. There’s a certain amount of evolving that needs to happen in order for her to get at the core of what’s making her unhappy,” she says. “That’s what the show’s always been: Someone having a complete breakdown, understanding why that’s happening — and only when she really has that breakdown can she build herself up.”
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