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It's Bullseye. I'm Jesse Thorne.

My next guest, Rachel Bloom, created and starred in one of the funniest, and I'll say probably one of the silliest TV shows to ever run on a major television network.

Here is a great example of that.

Among the many, many musical sequences on the program, this one is Bloom doing a dead-on golden age of musicals style number,

but it isn't about, you know, New York, New York, or singing in the rain or whatever. The subject

instead is a Los Angeles suburb, perhaps most famous,

for being just west of a different L.A. suburb that has an in-and-out that's right next to an IKEA.

West Covina, California. West Carolina.

California.

Crazy ex-girlfriend ran for four seasons on the CW.

It won a bunch of Emmys, topped a bunch of lists.

It's not only hilarious and silly. It was also deeply emotionally

moving, a really remarkable achievement. Many of the songs on the show were co-written by Bloom

with Adam Schlesinger, who was also the founder of the rock band Fountains of Wayne. The last

episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend aired in April of 2019. A year

later, Schlesinger died of COVID-19. Bloom faced cataclysmic events in both her personal and

professional life. She'd lost a songwriting partner. She'd just become a parent. She had no

idea what she was going to do next in her

career. And I mean, everywhere else, it is the spring of 2020. I mean, how can you even think about

joky musicals at a time like that? It took her a few years to process all of those cataclysms. Now we have the result.

...