WASHINGTON — Tired of being stuck indoors with nothing to do during the Blizzard of 2016?
Newly crowned Golden Globe winner Rachel Bloom has an idea: watch “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.”
“First of all guys, all episodes that we’ve aired so far are available for free on Hulu and CW.com, so you have no excuse,” Bloom tells WTOP, urging us all to catch up before Episode 10 airs on Feb. 1.
“Second of all, it takes place in Southern California. Episode 8 is actually about how warm it is in California at Christmastime. So you can pretend to be warm,” says Bloom, whose character Rebecca abandons New York to follow ex-boyfriend Josh (Vincent Rodriguez III) to West Covina, California.
“And third of all, it’s a good show and it’s unique and it’ll go by quickly,” she adds. “And it’s a musical so it’ll distract you from your troubles, except when we’re being sad because it does get sad sometimes.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsmpDlgrOiQ
The series debuted on The CW on Oct. 12, 2015, but it flew under the radar until award season.
“We’re a dark musical comedy on a broadcast network, and I think the people didn’t hear about it or know what it was, so I think this will be great and it will be attracting the right type of audience.”
What is the right type of audience?
Why, Washingtonians, of course.
“It’s a show for smart people,” she says. “You guys are in Washington D.C., so you’re smart people, because your people like the president and senators.”
WTOP quickly points out that not all D.C. residents are politicians, but Bloom doesn’t believe it.
“You’re all senators. I assume everyone who lives in Washington D.C. is like senators,” she jokes.
“Senator” Bloom should have no trouble getting re-elected. She has accomplished a lot in her short TV reign, winning both a Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award for “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgj0hq7NavY
Bloom says those accolades haven’t quite set in yet.
“I spend most of my time working, so I haven’t had time to just be a person and reap the glorious rewards. But I’m excited to realize that I’m better than other people and act like it and just be terrible to everyone. I’m looking forward to that day,” she says with her signature tongue-in-cheek style.
In addition to the personal accolades, she hopes the awards will bring attention to the show itself.
During her Globes speech, Bloom recalled how the pilot was originally rejected by Showtime.
“To even make a pilot in the first place is near impossible. It is so hard to get something put on television. So the fact that I have something on television and it went through two different networks before getting on television is pretty crazy… I can’t believe someone is letting us do this musical television show because we have two to three musical numbers every episode,” Bloom tells WTOP.
Many of the show’s songs are recorded in two versions: one safe for air, one explicit for the web.
In this way, Bloom’s journey has come full circle. For four years, she created comedic musical sketches online, at first self-funded, then produced in conjunction with Cracked.com, before screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna (“The Devil Wears Prada”) stumbled across her work.
“She was procrastinating and she was on the website Jezebel,” Bloom says of McKenna.
“One of my music videos, ‘If Disney Cartoons Were Historically Accurate,’ was featured on Jezebel and she watched all my stuff and I got an email saying, ‘Aline Brosh McKenna wants to talk to you about creating a musical television show.’ And it was in that first meeting that she had the idea for a movie called ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,’ and we decided to turn it into a TV show.”
Such a success story provides hope for other folks cranking out funny web content.
“The goal was not to go ‘viral.’ I had moderate success on YouTube, but not compared to some people who are getting 16 million views per video. A lot of these people have the support of tweens, but that wasn’t really my demographic,” she says.
“I just wanted to create good work that felt like me. So that’s more what I take away from it: create good work and then find some way to put that good work out there.”
