Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: anger, catharsis ... and show tunes

Not many shows feature song and dance numbers about violent obsessions. But then Crazy Ex-Girlfriend – the third outing of which just landed on Netflix – wears its musical sadcom credentials proudly. Indeed, the season started with titular ex, Rebecca, too depressed and humiliated to get out of bed – a sure sign that the laughs are unlikely to get any lighter this time around.

As for the music, there were power ballads on wallowing in a fugue of self-hatred and big Broadway numbers, in which characters spontaneously burst into song while pirouetting across the screen. What makes the show so dazzling is that it articulates something real about being a woman in 2017: we want to be independent and self-possessed, but we’ve been conditioned to think we need a man. We want to project an aura of competence, but depression is endemic. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend considers all this against the ludicrous aspirations sold to women; its thesis is often that “craziness” is the human response to these preposterous expectations.

A quick recap, in case you haven’t yet had the pleasure: the show began with Harvard-educated Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) packing in her lucrative legal career in New York after a chance encounter with her teenage summer-camp romance, Josh Chan (Vincent Rodrigues III). She moved to West Covina, a tiny suburban town in southern California, complete with bubble-tea-punctuated strip malls and her sweet, simple ex. Despite insisting, mostly to herself, that she hasn’t moved there because of Josh, he swiftly becomes the surrogate cure for her manifest personal problems. She triumphantly disposes of her meds and stubbornly rejects the advice of her therapist, pursuing Josh until she gets him. The second season ended with their doomed shotgun wedding, Rebecca abandoned at the altar with the news Josh has left her – to become a priest. Now, she’s pledging bloody revenge.

Star Bloom (who co-created the show with showrunner Aline Brosh McKenna) began her career writing and singing niche musical comedy and has since gone on to win best actress in a television series or comedy at the Golden Globes for the past two years. She describes the new season as a “funny Fatal Attraction” and the first episode showed Rebecca duly renting said film, dying her hair black and detailing a scatalogical retribution (“I’m gonna mail him my poop and pretend it’s cupcakes”). Truly, she is a woman scorned, because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend belongs to a tradition of shows – including Desperate Housewives, Cougar Town and Don’t Trust the B ---- in Apartment 23 – that are reclaiming sexist epithets and deconstructing why women might be perceived in such ways.

Couching the crazy in song is what makes the show shine. Bloom built her profile creating funny music videos on YouTube and has an easy knack for translating the absurdity of a behaviour into a perfectly pastiched pop song.

There’s Put Yourself First – a Little Mix-style banger on body modification being repackaged as personal empowerment (“wear fake eyelids ... just for yourself!”); The Sexy Getting Ready Song, a latter-day Mariah Carey slow jam in which Rebecca sizzles the skin on her neck with curlers and splatters blood across the bathtub while waxing her perineum; Sexy French Depression sends up the fetishisation of depressed women versus the reality (“my bed smells like a tampon”).

And then there are the songs about modern dating: Love Kernels – a Lemonade-inspired depiction of romantically licking the crumbs from the table (“little compliments here and there that I stockpile in my woman brain”); and Research Me Obsessively about the not unerotic thrill of stalking an ex’s new love on social media.

While Crazy Ex-Girlfriend cleverly picks apart the sexism fundamental to the “psycho ex”, it never loses sight of the fact that Rebecca is a woman with serious mental health issues that she refuses to properly acknowledge. She engages in flagrantly self-destructive acts that prompt her neighbour Heather, the majestically droll Vella Lovell, to use her as a case study for her college psychology class; she regularly blacks out on wine and chugs vodka before meetings; she hooks up with a stranger while she’s supposed to be on a date with someone else. Rebecca is both riddled with fears she is inherently unlovable, and a persistent narcissist whose perspective we can never fully trust.

She’s also a self-proclaimed, book-based feminist – which only muddies things further. She reads Roxane Gay and fluidly riffs stats on the orgasm gap. She’s also ambitious, intelligent and successful – yet can’t help defining herself via a man. She proselytises about the “cisgender patriarchal hegemonic hold on our imaginations and our hearts”, but will stop at nothing to woo Josh. She co-opts the rhetoric of feminism to legitimise befriending Josh’s girlfriend (“the misogynist myth that women can’t get along”). She knows the theory, but still buys into the dream she’s been sold: the Etsy trinkets at the wedding, the validation that will come from love.

With season three featuring an 80s synth-pop number called Let’s Generalise About Men, Rebecca appears less beholden to the external affirmation Josh might provide, instead vowing to destroy him. Her personal problems, it seems, remain outsourced and she is still making him the centre of her universe. But with anger comes catharsis – and I’m rooting for her.