Best Show on TV

OK, I don't get premium cable, so I might have a slightly narrow point of view, but I'm going with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Rachel Bloom collected a couple of best actress awards for her portrayal of the title character, an intellectually brilliant lawyer (Harvard and Yale) who has just made partner at her high-powered Manhattan law firm, but realizes that she is utterly miserable when she runs into her (ten years ago) summer camp boyfriend Josh, who is about to move back to his boyhood home in West Covina, CA. She impulsively quits and moves to West Covina. The show is an occasionally dark musical comedy about the stalking that ensues, enlivened by characters sometimes breaking into song.

The best thing about the show is its funny and frequently penetrating wit, intelligent but not pretentious. The humor is a bit on the raunchy side, but when I compare it to say, the equally raunchy but relentlessly dumb "Two Broke Girls" comparisons fail. Bloom and her co-producer run the show and deserve all the credit for its many virtues. It's probably worth mentioning that Bloom started with a background in music and sketch comedy, and the show deploys her skills to impressive effect. She first came to the attention of television through her YouTube videos, notably her paean to the "greatest sf writer" irreverently and salaciously called "Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury."

The second best thing about the show is its characters, almost all of whom are quirky but curiously endearing, even the "villain" of the show, Josh's slender but gorgeous girlfriend, a controlling but not terribly bright yoga instructor who nonetheless has twenty-twenty vision for the threat posed by the crazy-ex.

Mayim Bialik (Amy of Big Bang Theory) interview Rachel here.

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