Jokes that are gratuitously offensive are synonymous with bad writing to me. I'm offended as a writer first and as a person second.
— Rachel Bloom
When a network passes, you really mourn the show. The official state of grief in Hollywood is saying you're taking around a dead pilot.
The title 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' is meant to be a deconstruction of a stereotype, and the whole show is about deconstructing the boxes that we're supposed to be put into. We like taking apart the tropes and the stereotypes and explore the nuances, so 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' is a label that we go deep underneath to explore.
For lack of a better word, I've let love and infatuation emasculate me.
Making a musical television show was always the ultimate dream. But I really didn't think it would ever happen. Because who's going to make a musical television show?
I love musical theater so much. When done right, I think comedy songs can be the most efficient form of joke delivery. Songs can be the most efficient and the best forms of conveying emotion. Music is universal. It's worldwide.
I really admire people who have a natural sense of style. They have a super power.
I lived with Ilana Glazer of 'Broad City.' She was my roommate for a year and a half. I was living with her just as she was creating and filming 'Broad City.' Both of us, and a lot of my friends, come from the Upright Citizens Brigade theater either in New York or L.A.
Musical theater is an American genre. It started really, in America, as a combination of jazz and operetta; most of the great musical theater writers in the golden era are American. I think that to do a musical is a very American thing to me.
The effort of every time I put out a video, it was like, 'Okay, I've got to put it on my Facebook, I've got to put it on my website, what's the view count now? What's the view count now? What's the view count now?' You get obsessive with it.
When I graduated, I was director of my school's sketch comedy group, and I knew that I wanted to be writing and performing my own sketch comedy. It kind of made me want to do my own one-person sketch group.
I'm a comedian, and I have my share of anxiety and depression; so do most of my friends. My humor tends to lie in the juxtaposition of extreme lightness - I'm a huge musical-theater fan - and extreme darkness. And so I really like playing with those because that's how I feel.
I have noticed when you get a bunch of dudes in a room together, and you just have one woman or two women, the dudes will bro out. And the woman won't get heard.
I was made fun of a lot in middle school. When I was in seventh grade, the popular kids paid the most popular guy to ask me out.
I like deconstructing things. I like cutting the legs out from under something that feels secret.
Everyone around me was super-cool and laid back and skinny and tan and volleyball-y, and I was just this neurotic kid who was singing 'Annie Get Your Gun.'
All those things you hear about networks trying to stifle creativity - CW lets creators create and gives us freedom.
I had a relationship where we found out each other's Facebook passwords and would check each other's messages. That's not healthy.
We're all trying to be Beyonce and Sheryl Sandberg at the same time.
It's double talk and double standards. It's like, be honest, but don't be too honest. Look fresh-faced and young, but don't tell us how you got there. God forbid you have plastic surgery, even though we're telling you, 'Oh, you look old.' Be a career woman, but also, why aren't you having kids? Are you some kind of cold shrew?
The definition of a musical is that the emotion is so strong that you can't talk anymore, you have to sing. The emotion isn't strong enough when you're just like, 'Let's take a second to sing about lamps!'
Fashion has always been a source of stress for me because I don't know how to dress myself. I'm short-torsoed with big boobs, and I don't really understand what a belt does. But you get on these shows, and people fit the clothing to you, and suddenly you learn, 'Oh, I should be wearing petite jackets.'
All I listened to until age 18 growing up was musical theater. I liked the escapism of it.
I grew up in Southern California, and I particularly did not fit in. I always felt like a fish out of water in my hometown because everyone was very happy, and I was thinking about death and anxiety, and not many other people around me seemed to be thinking about that.
Most of my stuff hasn't gone viral. I have been successful on YouTube and I'm very proud of the stuff that I've done, but compared to the people who are actual internet stars and making a living off of it, my views are nothing.
We're told all the time to give up everything for love. That's the Western notion of what love is - love conquers all, all you need is love. And there are so many different kinds of outside, conflicting pressures on women.
I was doing these music videos online for a couple years, and they'd be doing well to varying degrees. And I released an album, and with the album, I released three new music videos, and one of them was featured on Jezebel.
Jewish, black, Filipino, whatever the specificity is, it's specificity that makes a good story. And I think people are tired of seeing the same old shtick on network television. It's just a group of white people hanging out talking about their jobs. Who cares? We've seen that.
Only children are weird. The only children I know, including myself, are either superweird or very talented and special or a mix of the two. I think there was always a certain independence and loneliness - I had a lot of imaginary friends as a kid.
While actors are great and awesome, writers literally create new worlds from scratch. What is sexier than that? Personally, I don't know why every last person out there isn't dating a writer.
When we're obsessed with someone, it's never about them. It's about us hating ourselves. And that's generally the tone of a lot of my videos, which is this desperate character who's overcompensating with being super happy. But she's broken.
I feel like a lot of serious music lives in generalizations - 'Love is a flower,' 'The sky is so dark' - but comedy lives in specifics.
I'm married. I've been with my husband for six years. Now that I know what a healthy relationship is, I find I can write better about the unhealthiness of relationships.
There's so many confusing messages that you're being sent about being pretty but not too pretty, smart but not too smart, ambitious but in a way that makes people comfortable. It's very hard to navigate.
I have such pride in furthering the American musical and using it as a way to tell story.
I have my own show at 28 and a Golden Globe. So, yes, I face rejection, but I've also been very fortunate and understand how fortunate I am.
You create your own material to try to get it out there because a lot of people are multi-hyphenates, to use the corporate term. You're creating stuff to be in in order to showcase all your talents. I think the idea of using YouTube and the Internet, you don't have to wait around for a network to buy your show.
I've loved musical theater ever since I was a kid. My mother's a pianist, and my grandfather was an amateur theater director and stand-up comic. And I was an only child. And I loved attention. So from an early age, my family was teaching old musical songs.
I think people like musicals. And when done with a modern comedic sensibility, musical comedy can be the most efficient delivery of both storytelling and jokes.
For myself, the way that I learned comedy was doing it live for four years, and only after doing sketch for four years did I feel confident enough to be like, 'Okay, I feel good about starting to put stuff on the Internet where it lives forever.' As opposed to one time at a college sketch show where it bombs and we never speak of it again.
I was kind of an unhappy kid. I always felt like a cynical New Yorker trapped in a little kid's body. I started to get some pretty bad anxiety disorders around puberty, which totally did not work with growing up a mile away from the beach. I started cutting my own hair.
It's understandable why TV hasn't been diverse because a lot of TV writers are white dudes from Harvard. And white dudes from Harvard aren't going to immediately want to write about trans issues. They're not immediately going to want to write about a Filipino family.
I think in a lot of network television, everyone's vaguely Protestant and doesn't really go to church so they can be 'relatable.'
My standards are based on shows I like, like 'Girls' or 'Arrested Development.' And they're all shows that are groundbreaking. I guess in the back of my head, I think, If you're not being groundbreaking, then what are you doing? If you're not being ballsy and honest and vulgar, then what are you doing?
The No. 1 thing I am earnestly attracted to is intelligence.
