I’ve spent about three years of my life searching for the term “#CrazyExGirlfriend” on twitter.com. Just about every single day, as a ritual, I type that string into Twitter’s search and hit enter. Usually more than once a day.

Why would a person subject themselves daily to the online discourse within that particular hashtag? Well, I’m the fan behind @bunch_of_fans, a twitter account for devotees of the musical comedy television show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend on the CW. We sell CXG-themed merch for charity ($6500 raised for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention), we make many of the GIFs you may have seen on Twitter that are from the show (1 billion views & counting), and we share with other fans both the excitement of watching week-to-week and the latest Crazy Ex-Girlfriend news.

Hence, that daily ritual of mine. #CrazyExGirlfriend. Enter.

And… retweet.

But something big is happening in that hashtag very soon. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is coming to an end. Soon, the last episode will air of this show that I’ve spent so much time enjoying, analyzing, and GIFing.

Done. No more.

A lament under a lone spotlight

You, reading this screed by me, the kind of person who would create and run a fan Twitter account for a TV show for three years, and promptly hearing from me that said TV show is coming to an end, might reasonably infer that this letter is a plea…

“Dear Internet, It’s me, Super Fan, trying to save my favorite show from the jaws of cancellation by appealing to you, Unsuspecting Social Media Influencers… [tree frogs…feminism…mental health…FRIENDSHIP] …In conclusion, please save us, Lin-Manuel Miranda. All the Best, A Bunch of Fans”

Shout out to my fellow B99 fans, & also, #SaveODAAT

But that’s not this letter.

Why? Because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend wasn’t cancelled.

(It still gives me a little pinch of joy to say that: it wasn’t cancelled. )

Thank you, Mark Pedowitz, and disregard the above.

And that’s actually what I’m here to talk about. Why it’s so fucking important that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend lived, despite being the exact kind of show that usually gets regrettably nixed before its time. I’m here to talk about why it’s a goddamned miracle (to quote Allison Shoemaker of The AV Club) that this show exists at all and why it’s a blessing to the world that it ran for the four seasons that its creators, Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna, envisioned.

Aline & Rachel after performing a rap battle between two Jewish American Princesses at Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Live in Los Angeles. Your co-creators would never.

Four seasons of improbability — from the achievement of songwriting team Bloom, Dolgen, and Schlesinger in inventing from the ether over 150 original songs that often make you cry as hard as they make you laugh, to the sheer amount of talent packed into a cast that blows you away with their acting before you even realize they can all sing and dance, too. And yes, the CXG team actually pulled off the tonal high-wire act required to make a show that is one of the most laugh-out-loud-funny comedies I’ve ever watched and simultaneously one of the most genuinely devastating stories of a person being seriously sad when she wants to be truly happy. And the last improbable victory, really the core victory of the show, was that it was able to take the maligned tropes of a genre derided by a misogynist culture as being “for women” — the romantic comedy — and show that they can be tropes that really are for women… and for all humans really: for us to unironically enjoy, for us to satirize and laugh at and critique… but, ultimately, for us to explode out of, in all our fucked-up-ness and joyfulness and passion and complexity.

That this show could accomplish all of that and get a complete four-season run to tell its story is amazing. That it could do those things while being titled Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is even more of a marvel. It’s a title that initially repulses the very crowd of sensible 18–49 year olds that the show itself is meant to attract. Is it called that to help retake the conversation about that term? To undercut the tropes of a sexist stereotype? Yeah, sure, those are great reasons, and I think it achieves those things through the story itself — but why is it called that?

I think it’s called “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” because it has to be. The show had to call out Rebecca Bunch as fitting the “crazy ex-girlfriend” stereotype right up front because if the creators didn’t claim that specific term for their own use, the world would use it against their show and their main character. Impatient critics might say the writers were trodding out the old sexist “crazy ex” stereotype just for laughs if the title didn’t signal from jump that satire and subversion were built into the DNA of the show. Yeah, we know we’re using a trope. Just trust us. On the other side of the spectrum, if the title hadn’t beaten them to the punch, casual viewers browsing network TV would likely weaponize that moniker against Rebecca in the same way it has been weaponized against so many women — both those with legitimate mental health struggles and those who simply dared to dump their asshole ex — as a convenient way to dismiss Ms. Bunch as simply an iteration on a theme. If it were called Meet Rebecca or Quirky Singing Lawyer or West Covina, many people’s first impulse upon seeing Ms. Bunch uproot her entire life to stalk a dude would be “oh I get it, she’s a crazy ex-girlfriend.”

But the whole point, according to the storytellers, is that, no, you don’t get it. You don’t understand her just because you’ve found a label for her. We’re here to show you who she is — the whole person beneath that label. The good, the bad. All of it.

Evergreen GIF

The title certainly didn’t help win the show a broad audience (it was consistently the lowest rated show on network TV), but it did signal the show’s attitude which, more than anything, was to boldly and defiantly tell its own truths and be its own thing, all else be damned. When you have an episode narrated entirely by a weather event as personified by a Frankie-Valli-esque crooner, or a folk ballad sung by an anthropomorphic pretzel duo, or a running musical bit about period sex, you’re really not going for mass appeal anyway. The bonkers nature of the show’s larger-than-life musical world, the incendiary jab of its title, the fast-paced story-upending shifts that the creators insisted on about three to four times each season, all seem to say: you do you — whether you’re a TV show or a troubled 26-year-old real estate lawyer or a middle-aged mother of two — and own it.

Having spent almost 4 years intimately acquainted with this show, the message I take away from it, both in how proudly it carves out its own niche in television history and in how boldly its characters and its creators proceeded in the pursuit of their stories, is this: you should go defiantly towards what you want to be instead of what you think others want you to be. That being as loud or as nerdy or as Jewish (or black or Latinx or Filipinx) or as into-musical-theater as you want to be is both an act of joy and an act of power. And through that courageous act, you will find your people — the ones who get you and support you and who will travel thousands of miles to see you perform a curated selection of comedy songs — and you’ll realize that you can be exactly who you are and be fiercely loved for it.

Fans of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend explain what it has meant to them (and sing each other’s “songs”).

We’ve gotten used to there being too much TV for us to truly appreciate any one show. We notch our bedposts with each Netflix-and-Chill — analyzing its politics, its story choices, and its “meme-orable” moments and formulating a tweet or two — and we move on to the next in the queue. And the ones that do genuinely touch our lives and move us and impress us — the ones that when we reach the last episode make us say, “I think I’ll go back to the pilot one more time” — often fail to receive the widespread recognition that we wish they did. The whole world sleeps on while we stay up rewatching The One With the 80s Rock Band of Legal Professionals for the umpteenth time. These shows make us feel seen… and we wish only that more eyes would see them.

But what I ask is that all of you reading this letter, upon the occasion of its final episode, whether you watched it or not, whether you loved it or not, take the opportunity to give this one strange and wonderful TV show not a moment of silence for its untimely death but a round of applause for its unfathomable life. That such an empathetic, nuanced, brave, and thoroughly female show could exist in a world often filled with so much hate, prejudice, and cowardly malice, especially towards those summarily dismissed as Crazy Ex-Girlfriends or Ditsy Young Girls or Unlikable Old Ladies, is an argument for hope if I’ve ever heard one.

I search #CrazyExGirlfriend on twitter.com again. There’s an interview from Aline & Rachel. Retweet. Fans list their top five songs from the show. Like. Like. Like. There’s some douchnozzle complaining about a girl texting him once. Block (that felt good). There’s another article about the show, but it’s a repost from a few days ago. Scroll.

Then, there’s a post from a fan about how they feel now that the show is coming to its final episode. And another and another and another. All to mourn the end, with gratitude for what Crazy Ex-Girlfriend gave to them personally: escape, perspective, a voice…or maybe just a laugh and a song.

And look, here’s another:

Oh wait. That one’s from me. Not fan twitter me, but real me.

Hmm. Shall I?

Retweet.