The Truth - Teller

Rachel Bloom, co-creator and star of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, has made it her mission to unravel the stories women tell themselves.

- Carina Chocano

You have to enter through a doughnut to arrive at the place where Crazy Ex-Girlfriend gets made. From the parking lot, the enormous frosted, rainbow-sprinkled entrance to the outdoor coffee-shop set looks like a magical portal separating real life (or a particularly grim section of North Hollywood, anyway) from the fantasy world of the show. Crossing the doughnut threshold feels especially symbolic now that the series is about to enter its fourth and final season. It makes me think of crazy dreams come true, girly powerhouses, the miracle of (creative) birth, and other things that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend would craft into songs at once filthy and ingenuous.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which airs on the CW, is the inspired, serendipitous love child of Aline Brosh McKenna and Rachel Bloom, the Golden Globe-winning actress who stars as the titular crazy ex. The two met five years ago when Brosh McKenna stumbled on Bloom’s music videos while procrastinating online and emailed her to see if perhaps there was a show idea in the videos somewhere. Bloom, now 31, was a musical-theatre kid a few years out of college who had moved into sketch comedy and comedy writing. She’d also started making humorous music videos like “Pictures of Your Dick” and the insanely catchy “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.” Brosh McKenna, 20 years Bloom’s senior, was a successful producer and screenwriter best known for a string of studio rom-coms and career-girl-coms (27 Dresses, Morning Glory, and The Devil Wears Prada, among others) in the ’90s and 2000s. Bloom loved musical theater, but she’d begun to feel it was weirdly retrograde and antifeminist. Brosh McKenna was coming to a similar conclusion about rom-coms: that they were “a little synthetic and out of touch culturally with where women were.” Creating a show together would be a chance to subvert both genres. It would also be a chance to tell a genuine story.