“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” was never a ratings juggernaut. It’s a show that, to use one very specific example, produced an hour-long CATS parody about having a yeast infection. It also allowed its protagonist to be endearing and awful, kind and cruel; it let her make progress, then backslide, over and over again. Few shows have swung with quite so much ambition, running with its idiosyncrasies and never questioning whether or not they were valuable. Few have even attempted to create a portrait of a person with mental illness that was realistic, hopeful, and brutally honest. The writers, producers, directors, musicians, and actors involved are all worthy of recognition and celebration. Rachel Bloom falls into all of those categories.

What’s life like after you spent four seasons doing all the jobs at once? How do you say goodbye to a show that keeps adding additional goodbyes to its end? RogerEbert.com wanted to know these things, and in spite of a still-crowded schedule that now includes preparations for another round of live shows, she made time to tell us.

It's been a couple of months since the finale aired. How does it feel? How does it feel to be properly done?

It's really cool. I mean, we did something that TV shows don't normally do, where we ended this narrative show, and then we made a big concert special while we were still editing the narrative show, and then we took a break, and then we did the Radio City shows, which felt like a whole other thing. And I just came back from London, which also felt like a whole other thing. So there have been a million goodbyes at this point, a million false endings, of a kind.

And while I was on vacation in Italy, getting ready for Radio City, and every night after that pretty much up until London, I'd have a dream. We were in the writer's room for season five, and I’d say, ‘Wait a second. Wait, guys, we only ever planned on four seasons, we ended the show,’ and everyone else would say, ‘Nah, shut up. Shut up. We’ve got to write season five.’ And every night, I’d have a dream of being back at work. I haven't had the actors’ nightmare of being on set and not knowing what the words were, but I've had the dream of being back in the writers' room, because this is when we would be writing the new season.