Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's dark turn

The show's second season turns an already grim love story into total dystopia

Rachel Bloom as Rebecca, Donna Lynne Champlin as Paula, Vella Lovell as Heather and Gabrielle Ruiz as Valencia.
(Image credit: Mike Yarish/The CW -- 2016 The CW Network, LLC All Rights Reserved.)

Rachel Bloom might be America's greatest and least romantic pop-culture bard.

Even before The CW's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, her razor-sharp semi-musical about an unhappy New York City lawyer-cum-stalker who moves to the ragged bro-ville of West Covina, California, to chase ex-boyfriend Josh (Vincent Rodriguez III), Bloom made it her mission to lampoon — with deadly acumen — the way we talk about love in America. From "Pictures of Your Dick," which satirizes the way chanteuses mourn breakups, to "Historically Accurate Disney Princess Song," which is exactly what it sounds like, her work fully indulges the guilty pleasures of whatever genre she's satirizing while mercilessly exposing its bizarre undercurrents. These sorts of parodies frequently turn dark. And Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's second season is diving deep into that darkness.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.