LOS ANGELES — A lively “let’s put on a show” energy pervades the production complex that houses “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” It’s appropriate, because the CW comedy’s characters, who use a varied array of tunes to describe their emotional plights, now and then unleash song-and-dance numbers that pay tribute to Hollywood’s golden age of big-screen musicals.

[ Listen to some of the best songs from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” ]

What the complex lacks in luxury — it’s in a scruffy neighborhood and there’s a porn store on the corner — it makes up for in scrappy ingenuity. An outdoor walkway doubles as the doughnut shop favored by Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom), the lawyer at the center of the saga. Cast members dart in and out of a recording studio near the writers’ offices, and the complex also contains editing suites, a large array of standing sets and a dance studio. Take the barn where Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney staged a musical in “Babes in Arms,” combine it with elements of Wonder Woman’s female-centric homeland, Themiscyra, add an adult bookstore, and you begin to approach the “Crazy Ex” milieu.

Few show business power players would covet this sun-baked corner of North Hollywood. But as the industry continues to grapple with its pervasive chauvinism and sexual misconduct, many are trying to catch up with where “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” has been since its 2015 premiere. The majority of its writers are women, it employs a diverse array of actors and directors and its protagonist is a multifaceted woman whose challenges, mistakes, triumphs and sexuality have been explored with honesty, wit and compassion.

“We’ve always had a very inclusive and obviously female-forward workplace, but now the subtext is text, in a way,” says the showrunner Aline Brosh McKenna, who created the show with Bloom. “The conversations that you were having with women individually are now public conversations, and everybody’s saying ‘This is not O.K.’ or ‘This is O.K.’ Everybody’s examining their behavior.”