For Your Consideration: 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend'

As critics, we are supposed to keep a professional distance from the art we are judging and stand aside when we can’t. That is the right thing to do but that is not, however, what I am going to do now as I write about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a series that has quickly become less a television show to me than friends I wished I had. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade my real life friends for anything, I just highly idealize the wonderful characters on this show who make me laugh and sing and, tonight, cry.

I can’t keep distance from this show, especially not tonight, especially when there was a time when I was like Rebecca Bunch (the glorious Rachel Bloom), staring at a handful of pills and thinking it was my ticket out of my sorrow. The show is too close to me now for me to be fully objective and yet I feel the need to plead for this show anyway, even as personally compromised as I am by my now closer than ever relationship to the show and this lead character who has in so many disturbing ways reflected some of my own worst qualities, including my need to occasionally break into song, I really can’t sing.

On tonight’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, spoiler alert for those reading before they get to their DVR, Rebecca found out that her mother, Naomi, had been dosing her with happy pills to pull her out of her post-Josh funk. The revelation would not be all that surprising given Rebecca’s long time strained relationship with her mother, played by the remarkable Tovah Feldshuh, but as we’ve watched, Mom has, as Rachel sings in a signature snappy song parody, become less of a heinous bitch.

There are no ways to overstate how brilliant the central song Rebecca imagines about her newfound love for her mother is. Using the framework of a classic Ronettes song, including a pair of bouffant wearing back-up singers, Rebecca dreams that perhaps she’s reached a place where she can resent her mother in the way that all women resent their mothers, a glorious place that is as close to true love the two women are capable of.

The love fest lasts until Rachel finds her mom’s pills and recognizes them as the secret ingredient in the strawberry milkshakes that mom has suddenly become okay with serving to her. In fairness, Naomi had just discovered that Rachel was spending time online googling the least painful ways to commit suicide. Naomi may be a harridan and her choice to secretly drug Rachel is part of her classically manipulative way of being controlling but it came from a place of genuine concern, a nice layer to the character that Feldshuh plays beautifully.

With her newfound relationship to her mother shattered and believing that her friends waiting back in Los Angeles no longer care about her, Rachel, aboard a plane to fly back to Los Angeles, if only to escape mom, finds that she’s brought the pills with her. A kind flight attendant offers the obviously shaken Rachel a cup of red wine, unaware of what Rachel has in mind. We think for a moment that a TV show would not "go there" in terms of an actual suicide attempt.

The power of this moment is almost incalculable, even if you’ve never been where I’ve been, staring at that handful of pills with ideas swirling in your mind about how easy it would be to just go to sleep and never wake up. My experience is no more special or powerful than yours, just a little more personal and because I have connected so deeply with the character of Rachel Bloom over the course of the series, the resonance gave me chills.

I was lucky enough not to take the pills in my hand. Watching as Rachel, a character on one of the funniest, brightest, smartest shows on television made the other decision floored me. Television shows have a history of walking up to the edge but rarely does one have the nerve to take a character to the darkest point, the one where real people go every day around the globe. I’m sure Rebecca will be fine, being the star of the show and all, but the attempt is nevertheless weighty and the aftermath I can only imagine will be just as powerful. And, knowing this show, it will also be darkly but wonderfully funny.

In case I may have worried anyone with my admission, especially since some are aware that I have had suicidal ideation as recently as last December, I am okay now. I’ve been to therapy and have found a safe and very helpful medication. Plus, I now know that I can’t die by my own hand as long as there are shows like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend to remind me that there is great art in the world to reflect on and remember why life is worth living.