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'Crazy Ex- Girlfriend' Preview: This Is Not What We Meant By Complicated Female Characters

By Emily Cutler | Videos | September 16, 2015 |

By Emily Cutler | Videos | September 16, 2015 |


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when I was doing my various previews of the network line-ups for this fall, I felt a little bad for not including The CW. I only watch two shows (Jane the Virgin and iZombie. Both amazing.) I can’t deny that they seem to be moving into the big leagues. I opted against the preview because they have just three new shows for the fall and only one of them has an actual premiere date. And that show? It’s a doozy. Crazy Ex- Girlfriend will air it’s first episode on October 12th, and I have no idea how to feel about that. Take a look.

That was … well … it …
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Exactly.

It’s not that the show seems bad necessarily (although it does seem fairly predictable. Is there any chance that Rebecca is eventually going to realize that Josh is not that awesome and that she should be dating the bartender?). It’s just that I’m not sure this is the kind “complicated” female character I’m interested in watching. Rebecca is unhappy with her life for whatever unnamed reasons. She packs up and moves across country to follow her high school boyfriend, and yeah, man, that’s crazy. Is the show then a deconstruction of that crazy impulse? We all know that this was a terrible idea, right? They can dress it up in any sort of “I needed a change, fresh start, new scenery, etc.” language, but what we’re actually shown is a clearly unstable woman making a huge, rash decision. Will they glorify that crazy to show that following your heart leads to good things? Or will they continually remind us that this shit is crazy?

Because that’s really going to make or break the show. Yes, they acknowledge the crazy in the title, but saying she’s crazy doesn’t have an affect if everything turns out alright for her. Unless the show-runners make it clear that the crazy needs to be fixed, the overall point of the show will be “single women does crazy ass bullshit, lives happily ever after.”

And really the worst part is that this experience is something that I’m sure a lot of women can identify with. We’re socialized to value and want romantic relationships from a young age, we over-invest in one particular relationship, and then we do crazy things. It could be sort of a digital bonding experience to share all of those embarrassing things we did back when we were crazy. Women’s stories are all too often marginalized and seen as petty. Coming-of-age stories about boys are nominated for Oscars while coming-of-age stories about girls are seen as That-Other-Kind-Of-Period Dramas. So we should be telling and celebrating stories about things as common in most girls’ lives as being boy-crazy. As long as that’s tempered with the reminder acting in this way is self- destructive and should be avoided if possible. If the show can frame this foray into crazy as a detour that needs to be corrected, it could be a fun, cathartic time. If it’s accidentally a “being crazy makes you happy,” I’ll pass.