Josh Chan and the Slanted Gaze

September 13, 2017

Let’s talk about Josh Chan. Now, Josh Chan is an incredible character for reasons within and without the context of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I really like watching him do stuff, and I really like Rebecca do stuff around him. There was a video a while back called “Was It Supposed to Be Greg?” which had gone through several iterations since before the channel started, and at one point was more a discussion about Team Greg and Team Josh. So I guess now we have occasion to revisit that other part of it, but first note that of course teams is not the way to go about this. … More Josh Chan and the Slanted Gaze

Darryl and Friends | Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Analysis

September 2, 2017

When Rachel Bloom talks about Darryl, one of the things I feel like she points out is that he’s a very lonely character who has this fundamental sadness and of course didn’t know why until meeting White Josh. As we see, he’s on a kind of desperate quest to be friends with someone. On paper, that sounds pretty tragic, but like Rebecca, he’s just too sunny to bring the tone of the show down. … More Darryl and Friends | Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Analysis

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend | Issues to Address

August 5, 2017

Media analysis can be rough, when you dig really deep you got to make sure you remember how and why you got there. This YouTube channel started under a simple banner: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is so good and so smart. But it’s been a few months since I was initially struck by the show’s unexpected good and smartness, “unexpected” measured not by a show that looks like this but by television itself, and in the time since, I’ve witnessed various negativity — one scathing review, a number of issues raised by the fan community, things like that. … More Crazy Ex-Girlfriend | Issues to Address

Our Implicit Bias Holds the Remote

July 2, 2017

“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

Heather: A Definition of Cool | Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Analysis

June 4, 2017

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

Was It Supposed to be Greg? | Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Theory

May 10, 2017

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

Ghost in the Shell, Old and New

April 9, 2017

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