Love, Mental Illness, and why you’ve got to face the music: the subversive genius of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

And yet while our eponymous character shies away from her issues, the show itself never has; it’s always been confident and open in its depiction of Rebecca’s mental health issues. Indeed, it’s built into the very fabric of the show itself, with the various musical numbers of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend acting as a representation of Rebecca’s dissociative episodes, and often explicitly dealing with the programme’s darker themes. This “juxtaposition of extreme lightness and extreme darkness”, Rachel Bloom put it, informs the way Crazy Ex-Girlfriend depicts anxiety and depression, and is perhaps why the show can tackle these issues so directly – there’s always a veneer of whimsy, even when the addressing serious subject matter. There’s something quite significant about the fact that a mainstream television programme is confronting these themes at all, let alone quite so regularly and openly.

An article I wrote today about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and mental health. I’m likely to return to this in future; there’s so much to be said about this show that one article can’t quite cut it.

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