Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is quickly establishing a tradition: the opening episode blow-out. In the first moments of the very first episode, its creator and star Rachel Bloom performed an extravagant Busby Berkeley-style ode to her new hometown of West Covina, with dozens of synchronised dancers, a giant levitating pretzel and a marching band that’s eventually bundled offscreen due to budget cuts.



The second series swings even harder for the fences. “We have this song coming up in the first episode called Love Kernels,” Bloom tells me, her voice as quick and clipped as a 1940s screwball star. “It’s this dreamy, Beyonce, Lemonade-type thing – and it’s the thesis of the entire episode.”

Love Kernels is a handy microcosm of what makes Crazy Ex-Girlfriend so special – and why word has spread about this odd little musical series (think Flight of the Conchords, not Les Mis). It’s ambitious and silly and so self-aware that the entire last verse is about the video’s cost, and how its budget has forced one cast member to be replaced by a broom. But it also comes from a place of devastating emotional specificity. Bloom’s character Rebecca Bunch has a new boyfriend, and he’s being distant, so she’s found herself clinging to his every offhand comment, no matter how pathetic.



Love Kernels … Bloom’s Beyonce-inspired song. Photograph: CW

“A lot of the time, love is seen as the be all and end all,” Bloom says of her show’s mission statement. “Love is seen as the greatest feeling in the world, but what’s not really explored is why. That’s something I hadn’t seen before.”

So you’re anti-love? “No, we’re not saying ‘love is bullshit’, but just looking at love for what it actually is.”

The show certainly isn’t afraid to tackle the crummier side of love. In the first series, Rebecca impulsively quits her high-flying job as a New York lawyer and moves to a tiny, nothingy California town to win over her childhood sweetheart Josh. He has a girlfriend, but Rebecca dedicates her life to splitting them up. She meets a more suitable love interest, yet rejects him in favour of this obsession with an idealised figure she doesn’t really know.

If Crazy Ex-Girlfriend were a 90-minute romcom, this behaviour would be seen as harmless and adorable. But stretched across an entire series, cracks begin to appear. It is, in short, a very upbeat comedy about stalking. During one epiphany, Rebecca realises she’s become the villain in her own narrative. In another, during a song called You Stupid Bitch, all her past deceits pile up and drive her into an explosion of very authentic self-hatred. It’s this balance of silly comedy and lacerating self-exploration that makes Crazy Ex-Girlfriend unlike anything else on television. You could describe it as a DayGlo Fleabag, if that weren’t so reductive.

“It’s been really cool to have so many people identify with Rebecca,” says Bloom. “She’s such a specific character – an amalgamation of me and my writing partner.” Although now married to How I Met Your Mother writer Dan Gregor, Bloom has previously described the series as “emotionally autobiographical”. It’s set in Southern California, where she was raised. It deals with the consequences of depressive anxiety spirals, with which she’s had brushes. Her character was a lonely, unpopular only child. As a self-proclaimed “weird drama kid”, so was Bloom.

I’d heard that one of her primary pastimes as a teen was Rollercoaster Tycoon, a videogame where you painstakingly create an artificial theme park from the ground up, maintain it then fend off disaster at any cost. “You heard right!” she says. “Literally just that game. I was obsessed. I’d play it for hours and hours. For a long time I wanted to be a rollercoaster designer. If I was better at physics, it might have panned out.”

In a sense, maybe it has. Bloom shot to prominence six years ago with the self-funded YouTube video Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury, in which she proclaimed her graphic lust for a nonagenarian sci-fi novelist. It caught the eye of screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, then looking to make a movie called Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. After meeting, the idea became a rejected half-hour pilot for Showtime, before blossoming into its current form. The dizzying number of roles Bloom now inhabits on the show – she co-created it, co-writes it, she’s the star and writer-performer of many of its original songs – almost seems like a throwback to her Rollercoaster Tycoon days. She’s creating an entire world in her image, and shouldering a ton of responsibilities as a result.

As we speak, she is on her way to shoot the seventh episode of the second series. There have been problems. Each episode contains a handful of original songs and one was almost impossible to crack. “The songs always come from the story,” she says. “But there’s one coming up that we had seven or eight versions of. We knew an emotional ballpark for it, and three of us took cracks at a different song. It was so hard.”

The hard work, nevertheless, is paying off. In January, Bloom won the best actress Golden Globe for her portrayal of Rebecca Bunch, with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend picking up a couple of Emmys later in the year. Again, you get the sense that this is because the series speaks to an audience that’s long been ignored, by verbalising a romantic anxiety lost in the din of TV’s love affair with brooding male antiheroes. Now that she’s got a growing army of devotees, is the pressure getting to her?

“No, we’ve learned just to do our thing,” she says. “The thing I love most about the show is that nothing’s black-and-white, happiness is not straightforward. To find happiness, you have to explore those grey areas in yourself.”

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend returns in the US on The CW at 9pm on 21 October, and in the UK on Netflix on 22 October.