Rachel Bloom

Rebecca Bunch has just done something she should not have done, and she is smiling about it. The smile is a fraction too wide and the eyes are checking whether it worked. That is Bloom's method in one face: she plays the woman we are meant to find alarming and shows us, without pleading, how much effort the alarming behaviour costs. Then, as often as not, she sings about it.

She came to attention in 2010 with a YouTube video, Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury, a lewd love song to a novelist, and it already has what the later work would refine: musical theatre pastiche, a joke that is also a confession, and a performer who does not flinch. Aline Brosh McKenna saw her later videos, and the two of them built Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015), which ran four seasons and 62 episodes with Bloom as co-creator, writer and lead. Since it ended in 2019 she has done voice work in animation, including Barb in Trolls World Tour (2020), released a memoir and performed solo shows.

The songs are the achievement, written with Adam Schlesinger and Jack Dolgen, and Bloom's rule for them is simple. "No matter what the song is or how funny it is, if it’s not rooted in an emotional moment, it’s going to feel false." So a number about obsession, loneliness or a bad decision arrives at the point where Rebecca cannot say the thing plainly, and the pastiche, whatever the style, is the disguise she needs in order to say it. We laughed at the early numbers as we were meant to, then somewhere in the middle of the run found one had got to us, because Bloom had let the sadness the show keeps mentioning stand in the frame with no punchline after it. As a performer she is loud, needy and clever, and she never asks to be forgiven, only watched.

The faults of the series are hers too, since she wrote it. There is too much of it; 62 episodes is a long time to circle one lie, and with two songs an episode some of them turn up because the format requires a song rather than because the moment does, which is the one thing Bloom says a song must never do. On screen she has so far shown us one woman, and we do not know whether she has another, because nothing has asked. Voice work and solo shows are smaller rooms than the one she built for herself.

The right next job for Bloom is another one she writes. Until somebody lets her, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the case for her, and it is a strong one, if a long one.