Rachel Bloom writes and plays women who sing about the thing they are lying about, and in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend she found a form that let a joke and a confession share the same three minutes. Nothing since has asked as much of her.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Rebecca Bunch's face when a song ends. Bloom plays her with a smile a fraction too wide and eyes that check whether it worked, and the check is where the acting is: the number has just told us something Rebecca would never say out loud, and now she has to go back to pretending she did not mean it. That is what Bloom does that other comic performers do not. She writes the song, sings it, and then has to act the moment after it.
The habit came before the series. From 2010 she was posting music videos online, the first to travel being Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury, a pop pastiche with a literate and filthy lyric, and she wrote for Allen Gregory and Robot Chicken while doing it. Showtime passed on the pilot she made with Aline Brosh McKenna; the CW picked it up, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend ran there for four seasons and 62 episodes between 2015 and 2019. It was never widely watched. It was, on our score, very good.
Its method was to take the stereotypes of the romantic comedy one at a time and have Rebecca try each on, with a song in whatever style the lie demanded. Bloom has said the rule plainly: "No matter what the song is or how funny it is, if it's not rooted in an emotional moment, it's going to feel false." With Adam Schlesinger and Jack Dolgen writing alongside her, the songs mostly kept to it. The show's weakness was length, and we felt it; four years is a long time to spend on one woman's excuses. But the pilot still does something we have not forgotten: Rebecca meets Josh Chan on a New York pavement, quits, packs and follows him to West Covina within a scene, and we laughed at the speed of it and then felt slightly sick, because Bloom never lets the joke cover how frightened the woman is.
The difficulty is what to do with that skill when nobody hands her a piano. Since the series she has mostly been a voice, Barb in Trolls World Tour (2020) among others, and in Adam Shankman's drag-queen disaster spoof of 2026 she is Donna Dusk in an ensemble that gave our review no reason to single her out. That is not her fault; the film recycles more than it invents. It is still a waste. Bloom is a writer who acts, and the parts that fit her are the ones she builds herself.
If you have not seen Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, start with the pilot, which has everything the show does in one episode. And keep an eye on whatever she writes next rather than whatever she is cast in, since the second has so far told us nothing the first had not.
Biography
Rachel Leah Bloom is an American actress, comedian, singer, writer and producer. She co-created, wrote for and starred as Rebecca Bunch in the musical comedy-drama series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019).
Bloom trained at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she earned a BFA in drama. She first gained attention through YouTube comedy music videos before moving into television and film. She played Donna Dusk in the 2026 film Stop! That! Train!.
Her work on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend earned her a Golden Globe Award, a Primetime Emmy Award and other television honours. She is married to writer Dan Gregor.
