Top (Ten) Songs: Season 4 (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend)

Finally getting around to a Top Ten Songs for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s final season. I thought the season 4 songs were a little all over the place (lots of numbers for more minor characters, quite a few gimmicky songs, not as many slam dunks for Rebecca,) but even though, musically, it’s not my favorite season, there are still some top-notch songs in here (including a few from those more minor characters!) Here are my favorites.

“No One Else is Singing My Song” – Great song for Rebecca, Nathaniel, and Josh to separately wallow in their self-pity of all feeling “uniquely” lonely in the exact same song. The joke is an obvious one, but the song does it well. I especially like how the rhythm on “No one knows the rhythm enough to sing along” really does change with every chorus, and the “entire company” part at the end is terrific. Not to mention, everyone sounds awesome here.

Best lyric: “It’s late and getting colder.” – “You’re only getting older.” – “And you’re next to someone who is fast asleep.” – “That’s so specific!”

“Don’t Be a Lawyer” – I can’t believe Jim has been an office character this whole time and only now in season 4 shows off his pipes and his moves in this killer number. Rocking a Bel Biv Devoe beat and Bobby Brown dance moves, this song enumerates all the reasons why becoming a lawyer is is a horrible decision. It’s full of clever rhymes (“Your only expertise / Is runnin’ up fees, / Speakin’ legalese like a dick”) and harsh truths about the profession (there’s no money to be had in any discipline of law that isn’t completely soulless,) and the whole thing is beautifully topped off when the CW lawyer who interrupts the song to issue a disclaimer swandives out the window in despair.

Best lyric: God, there are so many! I’m gonna have to go with, “Sure, your parents might think you’re a failure, / But no one’s ever said, ‘First, let’s kills all the tailors.’”

“I Want to Be a Child Star” – Although Rebecca’s half brother Tucker only appears in a single episode, this song makes it a memorable one. The show nails the look and feel of a preteen pop star, and Tucker’s enthusiasm for the inevitable spiral that’s sure to accompany his desired fame really sells the dark humor. The lines describing a child star’s rise and subsequent flameout are just too real (hang in there, kids from A Series of Unfortunate Events! Stay grounded and stay safe.)

Best lyric: “I want to sue my parents for emancipation / After they get caught stealing from me. / I want to be on the set / Of The Walking Dead / When I lose my virginity.”

“Trapped in a Car with Someone You Don’t Want to Be Trapped in a Car With” – This is a song that, while amusing, didn’t strike me too much when the episode first aired. However, the soundtrack has made me fall in love with it. I love the peppy Beach Boys-style number about dealing with an annoying car-ride companion, especially how the song shifts through a few different genres (because the car ride “goes on so long” that the “group” evolves from ‘60s pop to experimental hippie stuff to more commercial fare.) Also, like “Maybe She’s Not Such a Heinous Bitch After All” from season 3, there are some fantastic jokes in the background lines.

Best lyric: From the hippie section – “Why do we even have cars at all? / In the scheme of things, this Earth is small. / Or do I really need to travel somewhere / Or can I get there in my mind?”

“What U Missed While U Were PopUlar” – So fun and so true. At their high school reunion, George schools Josh on what all the nerdy kids were up to while Josh was busy being prom king. From the morning news team’s “hardcore” reporting to the band kids’ makeout sessions, the song covers various nerdy-kid niches and really celebrates that plenty of kids who aren’t popular still have plenty of their own kind of fun in high school. I also like the point it brings up that these kids also developed resilience, while Josh, who had it easy in high school, has been struggling more in adulthood.

Best lyric: “You were cool while we were not, / But our massage circles were super-hot. / We massaged while you were popular / And got massaged while you were popular.”

“Hello, Nice to Meet You” – First of all, even though I enjoy Skylar Astin, new!Greg remained odd for me, and I never thought he really felt like Greg. That said, I do like this song, a cute bouncy number in which Rebecca and Greg try to put their old baggage aside and pretend they’re meeting for the first time. The juxtaposition between the sweet meetcutes and the frank references to their checkered past together is done really well.

Best lyric: “I mean, is anyone we meet / Really that new to us? / We’re all the same species / That grew in a uterus.”

“Sports Analogies” – Oh, I love this one! A Rat Pack-style number of Josh and Nathaniel getting past their differences through the universal male language of sports analogies. Lots of terrific tidbits here. I always laugh when we cut to them in the big-band setting for the second chorus and both of them now have a scotch and a cigarette in each hand, and the jump from the sad bridge back into the peppy final chorus is a delight. It’s a song that makes me wish Nathaniel and Josh had more opportunities to sing together.

Best lyric: “Sports analogies, sports analogies.” – “We found the common ground in all men’s personalities.”

“Real Life Fighting is Awkward” – I almost forgot about this one, since it isn’t on the season 4 soundtrack. It’s in the background rather than being sung by any actual character, but it’s too much fun to be left out! The “Kung Fu Fighting”-esque ditty provides a perfect backdrop to Josh and Greg’s awkward fight. I love the intercut fantasy sequences of them fighting in an action film, kung fu film, musical, and sci-fi film, juxtaposing the slick, stylized moves with their clumsy grappling in real life.

Best lyric: “Real life fighting is awkward. / There are no cool side effects. / Punching doesn’t sound like anything. / You often hurt yourself / More than you hurt the other guy!”

“Love’s Not a Game” – Nice old-fashioned ensemble showstopper, not to mention a rare chance for White Josh to take center stage. His feigned outrage at the group betting on Rebecca’s “Three Guys, Three Dates” situation is just a fakeout, and he instead leads a peppy number a la Guys and Dolls. The melody is catchy, the lyrics are fun, the costumes are vibrant, and the dancing is terrific. But the irony is great too, the repeated repetitions that they’d never be so callous as to bet on their friends’ love lives, when of course they’re doing just that.

Best lyric: “Love’s not a game, / Love’s not a game. / That being said, let’s make it rain!”

“Eleven O’Clock” – This is, of course, Rebecca’s “eleven o’clock” number in the series finale. While I think “Rebecca’s Reprise” at the end of season 2 has a bit more of an emotional punch, this is still neat, cycling through snippets of a number of songs from Rebecca’s journey over the course of the series. I especially love the slide into “You Stupid Bitch,” and the conceit with the various costumes from earlier numbers is cool.

Best lyric: “It’s eleven o’clock, / And by eleven o’clock, / Shouldn’t I have earned a frickin’ ever after? / I’ve done the workbooks, taken the pills, / What more could I do? / How do I still not know myself / After all that I’ve been through?”

Favorite Characters: Greg Serrano (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend)

Although I’ve talked before about how Greg’s position in the show frequently made me nervous as a Josh fan, I do like him as a character. The show takes him places that aren’t always expected, and even if the “Greg 2.0” stuff in the last season isn’t entirely successful for me, we’ll always have Paris/Original Recipe Greg Serrano. (Some Greg-related spoilers.)

At very first glimpse, Greg seems like the obvious “real” candidate for Rebecca’s affections.  It seems all but a foregone conclusion that she’ll ultimately get a wakeup call about Josh, open her eyes, and see the nice-guy bartender standing beside her.  Fortunately, though, the show doesn’t keep things that simple.  While Josh’s persona gets retooled quite a bit in the early episodes, Greg’s opens up to reveal much more complexity than we find in the beginning.  What emerges is a sort-of friend/possible lover for Rebecca who is much more aware of her issues than others, at least in part because he’s dealing with a host of issues himself.

To be sure, Greg is a bartender, though he’d prefer not to be.  He’d love to get out of West Covina, go to business school, and “make something” of himself, but he put his dreams on hold to take care of his sick dad.  And in case that last point didn’t tip you off, it’s also true that Greg’s a nice-guy type, but again, it’s not quite than clear-cut.  I wouldn’t go nearly as far as to call him a Nice Guy, but Greg does have a tendency to rue his niceness a bit.  While he’s certainly not going to leave his dad when he’s needed (even if his dad doesn’t particularly want to be the fall guy for Greg not following his dreams,) he laments that he’s such a stand-up guy who can’t go after what he wants, and with Rebecca, he convinces himself that the only way to win her over is act like he doesn’t care about her.

Right around here is where we start to see Greg’s big bundle of insecurities.  He takes it as gospel that Rebecca’s disinterest in him is the surest proof that she’s his type, he looks down on his work, he has a warped view of his difficult relationship with his mother, and while he talks a big game about wanting to do something more with his life, he keeps one foot out of the water instead of taking a wholehearted plunge.  He carries a lot of negativity around with him – mostly concerning his views of himself, his bad breaks, and the town he lives in – and his coping mechanism of choice, sarcasm, can be sharper than his friends are prepared to deal with.

But just like I love Rebecca for being such a beautiful mess, I really like Greg in all of his flaws.  His screw-ups feel true to life and his self-sabotage can be painful.  Even as I sympathize with some of the more unfortunate hands he’s been dealt, I totally get why his friends occasionally need a break from his moods, but that’s okay.  It all works for me.  For one, I’m way more about characterization than character, and I’ll gladly take a messed-up guy who’s more sensitive than he lets on and is good at pretending not to care about things that matter to him over some bland guy-next-door with no discernible wrinkles to his characterization.  Simply put, one feels real, and that’s what I look for in my fiction.  But beyond that, another reason Greg’s issues work for me is because he does have plenty of good qualities to balance them out.  Despite the frequently-cartoonish tone, no one on this show is just one thing, and that includes Greg.  I love the moments when he can let the aloof-sarcasm routine drop and be real with someone about how he feels, for good or ill.  I love that he works on his problems, trying to recognize when he falls into dynamics that he knows aren’t good for him and trying not to self-fulfill his often-defeatist prophecies. But by the same token, I love that his progress on that front isn’t a straight line.

Part of the reason why I struggle with Greg 2.0 is that quite a few of those wrinkles feel ironed out, and I’m not altogether sure how to take it. It’s true that Greg disappears from the show for about two seasons, not returning until he really has done serious work on himself (including AA and actually going to business school.) As a character, he’s changed a lot, and the show lampshades recasting the no-longer-available Santino Fontana with Skylar Astin by Rebecca insisting that Greg has become “a completely different person.”

I get what the show is trying to do with it, and I am glad about Greg being in a healthier place. But my problem is that I can’t tell whether or not that’s what a healthier Greg looks like. Something feels off, and I don’t know if it’s because the writing isn’t believably-Greg or because Astin doesn’t quite sell me on him being the same character, albeit one who’s grown quite a bit since he was played by Fontana. A wire got crossed somewhere, and it never fully comes together for me.

A Few Thoughts on Josh Chan (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend)

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend recently aired its series finale, which worked for me on a lot of levels – I didn’t love season 4 as much as I did the first three, but ultimately, I thought the resolution worked for where they’d taken us.  At any rate, I thought it would be a good time for a post that I’ve been thinking about for a while, which deals with the character of Josh Chan.  While Crazy Ex-Girlfriend definitely deconstructs romantic-comedy tropes, it also interacts with them in more conventional ways, and shipping was a big thing on the show.  In the question of Team Josh, Team Greg, and later, Team Nathaniel, it’s hard for me to think about Josh’s place in the shipper wars without considering his race (romance spoilers from throughout the series.)

Even though this show checks numerous “yes!” boxes for me (smart, musical, whimsical, feminist, respectful LGBT representation) and, by all rights, it should have been on my watch list long before it did, Josh is in fact what first brought me to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.  I’d heard the show praised in several circles for having an “Asian male romantic lead,” and sadly, we’re still at the point where that is a big deal.  1) There are lamentably-few Asians on TV at all.  2) Even fewer are positioned in leading roles.  3) There’s a depressing gap in terms of showing Asian characters as desirable and in romantic/sexual situations, particularly with Asian men.  In other words, it’s important that the woman in the deconstructionist musical rom-com is “hopelessly, desperately in love with” this affable Filipino-American bro, because that’s not a role that would typically be open to Asian-American actors in Hollywood.

So, when I finally checked out the show, I was more than a little concerned with the first couple of episodes.  Yes, as soon as Rebecca arrives in West Covina, she meets a second potential love interest in the form of Greg, the sarcastic/sensitive (white) bartender.  Triangles happen – I don’t like it, but I get it.  What concerned me, though, is that even though Rebecca only has eyes for Josh, we the viewers can see more clearly.  And what we see is a Josh who’s at least a bit of a tool, kinda self-impressed, and certainly no prize.  Meanwhile, Greg is a charming nice guy lamenting that he’s fallen for a girl who’s hung up on someone else.  All roads seemed to be pointing toward an ultimate trajectory of Rebecca realizing that Josh isn’t worth all her pining and that she should look at the great guy-next-door Greg.

It’s a tried-and-true romcom technique, dangling the perfect-on-the-surface wrong guy/woman before the protagonist opens their ways to the one who was under their nose all along.  But when you start bringing race into it, it feels like a bait-and-switch to have the “wrong guy” be Asian-American and the “right guy” white.  Even though it obviously wouldn’t be about Rebecca rejecting Josh because of his race, the end result would be that the show’s Ross/Rachel, Sam/Diane, what-have-you would be with the white guy, and the Asian-American guy would only be a pitstop on the heroine’s way to love.

Fortunately, things don’t stay that cut-and-dried.  We start seeing signs of Josh’s sweetness and warmth by episode 3, and Greg isn’t as unambiguously-great as he first appears (not that Josh is a dear and Greg is a mess, of course – both guys have qualities and faults, which is ultimately why I like them.)  However, Rebecca’s interactions with Josh in the first two seasons pretty consistently hit “delusional” beats, while her interactions with Greg are more complex and suggest a deeper connection, albeit with a lot of damage and dysfunction.  Even though I personally felt as season 1 progressed that, with growth/healing on all sides, Rebecca could be a good fit with either guy, the message the show seemed to be sending was “Forget this Josh business, but this thing with Greg is worth fighting for, even though it’ll be hard. 

This becomes more complicated when we consider Josh’s position on the show, as the object of Rebecca’s obsessive love that’s in fact a byproduct of her mental health issues.  I get that Rebecca’s obsession with Josh is deeply unhealthy, and I can understand the show taking the tack that she’s not “supposed” to be with him.  But here’s my thing:  if the show knows that that’s Josh’s function, then it shouldn’t have accepted the praise from different outlets about Josh as an (again, incredibly rare) Asian male romantic lead.  To be fair, I never saw the show tooting its own horn on this subject.  But when it came up, I never heard anyone say, “Well, we want to be clear, Rebecca’s whole thing with Josh, etc., etc., but we do agree it’s so important to have Asian men shown to be desirable…” and so forth.  They just rather humbly took the win and talked about depicting West Covina as realistically diverse, when all the while, it was never going to be Josh.

These uneasy feelings about the show’s handling of Josh increase for me with season 2.  Follow the timeframe with me:  Greg leaves the show at the start of episode 4.  Rebecca and Josh get together at the end of episode 8.  The very next episode introduces another straight white guy (Nathaniel) who immediately starts comparing himself favorably to Josh.  And again, Nathaniel isn’t perfect – far from it.  But as with Greg, Nathaniel’s emotional damage is portrayed as complex, and we quickly see that he’s more successful, more intellectually stimulating, and challenges Rebecca more than Josh.  A mere two episodes later, Rebecca is kissing Nathaniel in an elevator.

After the rather impressive flameout of Rebecca and Josh’s relationship at the end of season 2, season 3 sees Rebecca eventually exploring her attraction to Nathaniel while Josh becomes more and more of a supporting character, usually the butt of a joke.  I wouldn’t say Rebecca’s thing with Nathaniel is all that similar to her thing with Greg, but both are depicted as extremely messy but real, whereas, when Rebecca and Josh are together, it’s always depicted as delusional.  And to repeat, I understand it if that’s what the show is going for, but why does it have to be messy/real relationships with the two white guys and delusional relationship with the one Asian-American guy?  How did the show not see how that looked?

On the plus side, season 4 does a little course-correcting on Josh.  While he’s still his sunny, slightly-dim self, he starts exploring himself a little more, getting into therapy, and he and Rebecca become friends again and even move in together (as roommates.)  It’s a balm to me to see him treated more like a character than a cheap joke, but I braced myself when the “love quadrangle” kicked in during the second half of the season with the return of Greg (albeit played by a different actor, a fact lampshaded by the show.)  The storylines become a very literal “which one will she choose?” Bachelor-esque dynamic between Rebecca and the three guys, and while Josh is treated as equally likely as the other two on paper, that almost made it worse for me, because I just didn’t see any way Rebecca would be “choosing” him, and it seemed unsporting to act like he was an equal contender for added “suspense” when most of the work the show had done over the last four seasons was pointing much more clearly at Greg or Nathaniel.  And even though, in the end, Rebecca decides to focus on herself and her own journey rather than “pick a guy,” it didn’t escape my notice that the one-year time-jump pairs up Josh with a nameless girlfriend while Rebecca, Greg, and Nathaniel are all conveniently still single, leaving viewers free to imagine Rebecca eventually getting back together with the white guy of their preference.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend will always get credit for even creating a character like Josh Chan in the first place (paving the way for The Good Place’s Jason Mendoza?)  I love that he’s an Asian bro, that he’s not book-smart, and that he’s definitely depicted as being hot – way to break stereotypes with the lyrics of one song featuring a bet that, of the three guys, Josh has “the biggest schlong.”  But when it comes to how it depicts him as a potential love interest in comparison to the other two (white) potential love interests, I don’t think the show gave much (or any?) consideration to the optics of how they were framing TV’s second Asian male rom-com lead ever (after John Cho in Selfie,) and to me, that’s disappointing.