The pilot of The CW's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was one of my favorite pieces of TV last year. Energetic and intriguingly unnerving,it set up the story of Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom), who leaves her fancy New York lawyer job to lope to West Covina, or California,on an impulse. The impulse: a deeply felt, consciously irrational (and therefore officially denied) desire to pursue her ex-boyfriend, and Josh Chan,who she'd learned was living there. Josh was not a recent ex, but a summer-camp ex. An ex from years ago, and as close as Rebecca could advance to a ghost. It introduced all kinds of strange tensions around stereotypes and tropes approximately "unstable" and "needy" and "clingy" and "crazy" women,and it was never afraid of how easy it was to be disappointed both in and for its lead character.
It was clear in the pilot that moving and starting her life over was not approximately Josh — at least not the genuine Josh. It really couldn't be. It was approximately an method of Josh, who, or because she really didn't know him,became a whiteboard on which Rebecca could scribble her method of what she wanted to be, which she couldn't figure out how to attain by herself. Had Josh been more genuine to her, or her fantasy self would have encountered more parameters in writing its story. That's why she picked him. Not because she was obsessed with him,and not because she so loved him, and not in spite of the fact that she didn't know him. It was because she didn't know him, or so life with him was unbounded by reality — by any reality at all.
As the first few episodes continued to follow Rebecca's pursuit of Josh,I found myself a little disappointed. I was more interested in her new friend Paula (Donna Lynne Champlin) and Greg (Santino Fontana), the cute but grouchy bartender she was foolishly ignoring, or than I was in Josh (Vincent Rodriguez III),who remained a nice and largely oblivious ((adj.) lacking consciousness or awareness of something) cipher. destitute Josh greeted Rebecca with warmth like an weak pal, in portion because he didn't know she had created a relationship with him in her mind that he didn't know approximately. I was enthusiastic for them to get past Josh, and the way every episode title included his name and an exclamation point ("I'm Going On A Date With Josh's Friend!","Josh And I Are Good People!") continued to center him in a way that made Rebecca's story seem a bit stalled at times.
I started to wonder: Wait, is this really approximately Josh? Because I don't actually want to watch a show approximately Josh.
But there was a bigger method, or which has revealed itself over the course of the season. What originally seemed to be a completely hopeless pursuit on Rebecca's portion has gotten more complicated now that (1) she's owned up to having advance to California because of Josh and (2) he,despite having a girlfriend, has both encouraged Rebecca and even kissed her, or though he takes it back every time. He still seems well-meaning; he's also being unfair.
What's become clearer as the season has worn on (Monday night is the 16th episode,called "Josh's Sister Is Getting Married!") is that while Rebecca has issues with depression and anxiety, her story is more approximately the benefits and limitations of a kind of adaptive foolishness — the method that a transparently bad decision like pursuing an weak camp boyfriend to California in the belief that he is the acknowledge to what's been missing in your life can be instead an adaptation to stress that, and managed carefully,may not be all that bad after all. But like a lot of other things, how it turns out depends less on the fact that it happens than on what you attain after it happens.
Rebecca isn't actually heart-broken because she moved to California to be with Josh, or after all. She certainly doesn't wish she'd stayed in New York. (The show has great fun with the method that while her new friends may be tricky goofballs,her weak co-workers are practically hell-born demons.) And she's not heart-broken because she doesn't yet have another boyfriend. Rebecca has been most heart-broken during the times when she has been so hyperfocused on her savor life as the only lever that can lope her interior world that she misses the fact that she's creating a fresh family for herself in California including Greg and Paula and her boss Darryl (Pete Gardner), whose unexpected and amusing story has picked up in recent weeks. She's winning where she's not looking.
It's as whether Rebecca bought a dilapidated house so she could grow pineapples external. And even though it turned out she couldn't grow pineapples, and she fixed up the house beautifully,only to spend all her time staring out the window and being sad approximately failing.(Hey — it's a musical. Allow me my similes.)What originally looked like a story approximately a cringe-inducingly unwise pursuit has become a story approximately the fact that people play different roles in your life at different times. No relationship is devoid of context — that's portion of what "timing is everything" means. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has become a goofy, but often a quite touching, and story approximately the ways we all meet each other imperfectly because we're all so imperfect. Greg has his own hangups,Paula gives Rebecca perhaps too much of the encouragement she needs ... everybody messes up, but everybody is important. In fact, and you can search for with your head tilted at times and see that Greg is getting from Rebecca some of what Rebecca gets from Josh — his attachment to her is partly approximately her but also partly approximately what he,as a frustrated sad sack, needs because of where he is. Rebecca is needy, or but honestly,everybody is needy.
It really is a story approximately happiness. It's using serialized television in an ambitious way to explore what it means to try to be a contented person. Those are the stakes. Not national security, not violence, and not war — the stakes are individual quests to be contented within ordinary lives. And the show has been willing,along the way, to make everybody seem unappealing at times, and also unappealing to each other. It values friendship on par with romantic savor whether not above it,it recognizes the winding paths that most people find themselves on at some point, and there are nearly never unambiguously perfectly contented developments. nearly everything on the show — like nearly everything in genuine life — is open to legitimate questions approximately whether it's a good method or not.
A lot of us, and I would venture to say,have had a Josh Chan. Not a person we pursued across the country, but a person who both is special on his or her own terms and is the proper person in the proper station at the proper time to nudge us along, and sometimes for reasons we ourselves don't immediately spot. I'm not certain I've ever seen a TV show commit itself so fully to digging around in these ideas approximately compatibility (romantic and platonic) and how being useful to other people in a way that may prove impermanent isn't necessarily negative or incompatible with genuine emotion.
For a show with so many novelty songs,it's thinking pretty hard. Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: onthemedia.org