“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” has always depended on the kindness of strangers. That some of those strangers are Emmy- and Tony- winners doesn’t hurt.
Despite holding the title of the lowest-rated, least-watched broadcast TV show of the fall for two years running, the little-musical-comedy-about-mental-illness-that-could was renewed last month by The CW for a third season and continues to enthrall its admittedly tiny fanbase, which happens to include the likes of Patton Oswalt and Patty LuPone, both of whom appeared on the show this year.
“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which wraps its second season tonight, stars co-creator Rachel Bloom as Rebecca Bunch, a tightly-wound New York lawyer who impulsively moves to suburban West Covina, Calif., to pursue a long-ago camp boyfriend Josh. In a recent episode in which Rebecca and Josh returned to her Scarsdale hometown for a bat mitzvah, LuPone played Rebecca’s childhood rabbi, who offers a blunt musical take on the Jewish experience during a hora: “Now it’s time to celebrate/Grab a drink and fix a plate/But before you feel too great/Remember that we suffered.”
“We don’t have a massive audience obviously, but the people who like the show really like the show,” says co-creator Aline Brosh McKenna in a recent interview with NJ.com in Los Angeles. “Whenever we hear that somebody likes the show, we try to get them in the show.”
Brosh McKenna is a screenwriter (“The Devil Wears Prada,” “Morning Glory”) who grew up in Bergen County and whose mixed feelings about suburbia is played out, often in song, in West Covina’s strip malls and big box stores. She teamed up with Bloom, best known for her outrageous viral video spoofs, to create “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which earned a Golden Globe for Bloom last year and two Emmys for editing and choreography.
Each episode features two full musical numbers in a dizzying array of musical styles, from a Broadway ballad with Sondheim-worthy rhymes about a failed relationship (“It was a S— Show”) to a slow jam about the fundamentals of cyber-stalking to torchy plea for validation from a random delivery guy.
Brosh McKenna, Bloom and the writing staff map out the storylines together at the beginning of each season, with the songs growing out of the writer’s room and written by Bloom, co-producer Jack Dolgen, and music producer Adam Schlesinger, the Montclair-raised songwriter and bassist for the pop group Fountains of Wayne (“Stacy’s Mom”). Part of the challenge, Brosh McKenna says, is “putting them together thematically so it’s really organic and it moves the story forward.”
And part of the challenge is keeping the lyrics safe enough for the small screen. You can find the more explicit versions on YouTube, and there are several that have ended up on the cutting room floor, “so incredibly dirty there’s no way to do a clean version of it … It’s just heartbreaking because it’s so hard to get a decent song together.”
The song she’s thinking of, by the way, was about sex toys.
The season two finale of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is Friday at 9 p.m. on The CW.
Vicki Hyman may be reached at vhyman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @vickihy or like her on Facebook. Find NJ.com/Entertainment on Facebook, and check out Remote Possibilities, the TV podcast from Vicki Hyman and co-host Erin Medley on iTunes, Stitcher or Spreaker, or listen below or here.
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