There’s something incredibly cathartic about watching a character unravel spectacularly on screen. You’re within the safe (yeah right) confines of the real world, and yet their fictional universe is something you live and breathe. When the end credits roll, yes, you empathise and reflect and hope your favourite characters didn’t do what they did. But at the same time, a cute puppy prancing by can put aside the trauma you’ve just inflicted on yourself. So I love watching hot messes on television, especially women (since I’m one too). It’s just the right amount of emotional involvement required without having to invest too much of yourself.
Lately, it’s been Crazy Ex-Girlfriend for me. The night before last, Star World concluded the show’s first season. I’ve watched the 18 episodes quite religiously going as far as to hum the musical series’ catchy tunes — ‘The Sexy Getting Ready Song’, ‘I Gave You A UTI’, ‘Heavy Boobs’ and ‘Oh My God, I Think I Like You’ — during the rare times I get to indulge in staring at the ceiling.
The show, created by and starring Internet comedic sensation Rachel Bloom, features a fictional (or not) version of herself as Rebecca Bunch. A chance meeting with an ex, Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III), who she dated in camp, compels her to leave her successful career as a hot-shot albeit depressed lawyer in New York to move to obscure and uneventful West Covina, California.
Bunch must then carefully traverse the minefield that is life and love while suffering from a serious pay-cut and executing an insanely devious scheme of trying to pry Chan from his hot girlfriend Valencia’s (Gabrielle Ruiz) clutches.
Here’s where the hot mess bit comes in: Bunch is a loon, and not a loveable one at that. But watching her make ridiculously bad choices just makes me feel better about the ones I’ve made, especially because hers trumps mine in scale and well, production values too. Wouldn’t we all love to have soundtracks to our life? On a good day, when your self-esteem is behaving and you feel invincible, just imagine that perfect song blasting through invisible speakers. But I digress.
Bunch suffers from anxiety, is susceptible to depression, and makes all the possible wrong choices. These include, for instance, her pathetically embarrassing attempts at winning Chan’s affections, absolute reckless abandonment of financial caution, and complete disregard of a guy who actually digs her.
Rarely has television gone to this length to get into the cause of a character’s problems. Instead, shows have focussed solely on the redemption of those love-to-hate characters. But Crazy-Ex Girlfriend lets us know of Bunch’s heavy, heavy baggage in satirically clever ways. We see it all: her abandonment issues due to an absent father, low self-esteem caused by a yearning for mummy’s approval, the inability to maintain healthy social relationships because of feelings of displacement and much more. The creators have smartly and oh, so subtly subverted the plot of a hot mess that’s it brilliant.
So we learn that this terrible pattern of bad decision-making is a reflection actually of a disease that most people don’t even know they suffer from. Don’t laugh now or roll those eyes, but it’s when people can’t love and accept themselves and therefore their intuition is blunted when it comes to making decisions.
In the past, I’ve loved watching hot messes primarily and sadistically to feel better about myself. But Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has made me fall more in love with watching hot messes, because it now prevents me from being one in the future.
