I love this episode because it exists both within and without, so meaningfully, very much a part of its own arc as the setup to the final arc, then becoming essential to the season, and yet also as a singular experience which feels unique even in the context of an endlessly inventive series. … More Sitcom’s End | Crazy Ex-Girlfriend #206 Analysis
“Implicit bias” is something that comes up here every once in a while; it’s pretty foundational to important things like sexism and racism, and if we say that the first step to defeating your intolerance is understanding it’s there, understanding the possibility that unknown biases could exist is that process revealed. In this video, I’d like to talk about implicit bias, appropriately the B story, while the A story is making a case for Affirmative Action in Hollywood. … More Our Implicit Bias Holds the Remote
By Rebecca’s definition, Heather is the cool one. And it isn’t hard to see why: she’s got style, she’s very chill, and when standing next to Rebecca, the chill is certainly amplified. Her easygoing nature is facility, though, as Rebecca and all sitcom protagonists require either encouragement or discouragement to move forward, and Heather’s good with pretty much anything. … More Heather: A Definition of Cool | Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Analysis
The bros and alpha males and studs of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend are like the vain yoga instructors, dreamboat fantasies and crazy ex-girlfriends — not what they seem. White Josh is the responsible friend, Hector loves his mom. But unlike specifically the crazy ex-girlfriend label, are men so desperately in need of a second look? … More Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Masculinity
If a TV character leaves a show without having died, we’ll always wonder if they’ll return, and sometimes even if they did die, especially if we have such a powerful emotional connection to them. For people who watch Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the idea that Greg was endgame is as reasonable as it is prevalent, and I say ‘most people’ because I read a headline that Greg left the show before I saw episode 3, so it was never my experience. … More Was It Supposed to be Greg? | Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Theory
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a sexist term, and deconstructing it is the name of the game for a show named Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a dark comedy/drama you can watch on The CW and Netflix, among other places. … More What is “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”?
On April 7, Production I.G and Kodansha announced yet another big Ghost in the Shell project, an anime to be co-directed by Kenji Kamiyama and Shinji Aramaki. No release date, no further details, so for now, we wait. And in this moment, we can’t in our minds help but connect it narratively to the American remake’s failure, not unlike Toho’s restart of Godzilla in the wake of Godzilla (1998), or even Oshii’s production of Avalon as ‘response’ to that other Ghost in the Shell remake. … More Ghost in the Shell, Old and New
One of the great things about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is how it surprises you, setting you up for one thing and then giving you the ol’ shim-sham, beginning with the title. You have a character like Valencia, who you might think you’ll hate or have to hate, and that’s proven false over the course of the season. Furthering the greatness then is how the surprises don’t stop at hello. Valencia continues to reveal compelling layers and do unexpected, hilarious things, and somewhere in the back of our minds we think, she’s supposed to be the bad guy. The vain yoga instructor. … More Valencia: The Other Woman | Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Analysis
I love Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, it’s my favorite American TV show since The Wire, at least, but it’s also important to me for a number of reasons. I used to do a podcast that more and more talked about the better tomorrow, and one of the driving takeaways was this notion that media and entertainment was our intermediary from here to, let’s say, utopia. Because if we want utopia, or an egalitarian society, a matriarchal empire, however you want to call it, we need to first imagine it. Put it on paper so we can cross things out and circle things and demystify. That’s what media does, even broadly, it facilitates our imagination. A lot of that work goes on in science-fiction, which was the subject of that podcast. But to my surprise and delight, I found that work going on elsewhere. … More In Defense of Nathaniel | Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Analysis
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s first season was perfect, as television. Now in the context of season 2, it seems, perhaps, not fully realized as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, but merely prelude. Season 2 is a more direct approach to the same story and mission, with explicit indictment of the funny bad stuff we had grown to love in spite of ourselves. In weighing both instances of the show, which is better? And do they point toward an identity for season 3? … More Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Season 2 Recap
