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.

Favorite Characters: Josh Chan (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend)

In a show populated by characters who are equal parts over-the-top and unflinchingly real, some dismiss Josh as being simpler, more cookie-cutter, than the rest.  But I have to say, I love Josh, and I think there’s more to him than meets the eye (premise spoilers.)

But first, of course, we have to talk about what meets the eye.  Rebecca dated Josh for two months ten years ago, and running into him on the street during a moment of emotional crisis is enough to make her move across the country to where he lives (hence the title.)  Josh is gorgeous, cool, and athletic, an easy-going alpha male and certified bro.  He’s what Rebecca projects all of her desires onto, and he’s characterized on occasion as both her prince and her one-man boy band.

Actual Josh, not Rebecca’s idea of him, naturally falls short of that ridiculously-idealized perfection.  The initial glimpses we get of him give off the appearance of being kind of a tool, although the show (thankfully) walks back on that aspect pretty quickly.  The flaws it instead gives him end up being more interesting to me.  He’s kind of stuck in “high-school” mode – I wouldn’t say full-on arrested development or anything, but he’s wary of big steps toward “real” adulthood, like Valencia’s not-so-subtle hints that she’s ready for him to propose in season 1 or his dithering over his living situation in season 2.  In a similar vein, he’s a major conflict-avoider and has been known to go along with stuff he’s not ready for/not cool with because he can’t pluck up the nerve to be honest about how he feels.  Plus, while it can get a little over-magnified by the more cartoonish side of the show’s humor, I like that he’s, well, not the sharpest knife in the drawer; it makes a nice change to see an Asian character playing against the model-minority scholastic-overachiever stereotype and be a little on the dim side.

So, we’ve looked at both ends of the spectrum – what about the middle?  Overall, Josh is a fun character for me.  Although he’s a total bro, he’s generally a kind, affable one.  I spent the first two episodes of the show wanting to like Josh more than I did, but he won me over decidedly in episode 3, where he reassures Rebecca about her lackluster party and then helps her turn it around at her request.  From there, we see more of Josh’s less-than-perfect traits, but we also see a lot of his sweetness and warmth.  He’s really genuine, a super-appreciative guy who celebrates everything he loves.  As he enthuses over Rebecca’s first crack at a Filipino dish or throws himself wholeheartedly into impressive dance moves, his happiness is infectious. 

He’s very sincere in his less-cheery moments as well.  I like how open he is with Rebecca about his insecurities, earnestly telling her how much it means to know she believes in him.  Because Josh is such an on-top-of-the-world sort of effortless cool guy on paper, it’s important to see that he has the same self-doubt as the characters who are more obvious messes.  It’s also important, given his tendency to shy away from tough conversations in other situations, that he can lay it all out like that when it comes to discussing his fears of inadequacy or his emotional needs (and after that last sentence, can we remember once more that he’s an absolute bro?  This is not a character I’m used to seeing on TV.)

Relationship Spotlight: Josh Chan & Rebecca Bunch (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend)

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s love triangle is interesting to me because, with either Rebecca/Josh or Rebecca/Greg, both participants are at present definitely wrong for each other, but in my opinion, either could be very right given some growth on the part of the characters in question.  We’re looking at Rebecca with Josh today, but I’ll also cover her and Greg before the show starts up again this Friday (some spoilers.)

Starting with the major elephant in the room:  at the moment, Rebecca and Josh should not be together because she’s obsessed with and has been stalking him and that’s not healthy for either one of them.  Instead of a person, Josh has become a symbol to Rebecca, a perfect specimen of perfect love that will “fix” her life.  She can’t see him objectively, because really, she’s not seeing him at all.  She’s only seeing the role she’s assigned for him in her head.  Meanwhile, Josh doesn’t know who Rebecca really is, either, because she spends so much of the first season hiding her “crazy” from him and trying to be the sort of person she thinks he would want.  Josh is working under the assumption that Rebecca grew out of her “dramatic and weird” tendencies after summer camp and has no idea of the heavy stuff Rebecca struggles with.

As such, any relationship between them hinges on both learning to see the other as they actually are.  Rebecca has to stop idealizing Josh and start to get comfortable letting him see the real her, and once Josh sees that, he has to recognize that a relationship doesn’t have to be “easy” to be worth it.  After an initial, major flame-out on a relationship attempt (because their issues and this disconnect between fantasy/appearance and reality will seriously mess things up, and that’s assuming everything doesn’t immediately crash and burn the instant season 2 starts,) I think it’d be cool to see them learning to be a couple as they really are instead of as each perceives the other to be.  Online, I see Rebecca/Greg shippers predicting that, when Rebecca learns to see Josh not through her infatuation-tinted lenses, she’ll realize that he’s wrong for her and that’s when she’s wind up with Greg.  Personally, though, I’m rooting for Rebecca/Josh in part because I think there’s a neat story to be told in forging a stronger, deeper relationship after the imagined perfection has been swept away.  (Granted, this would be way down the line – again, issues.)

So why, for me, are Josh and Rebecca worth the hard work it would take to be together?  I have two major reasons.  The first is fairly basic, but I still think it’s important; they simply seem to enjoy one another so much.  Over the course of the first season, we see them hanging out a ton, making each other laugh, helping each other out, and just having fun together.  One of the first scenes that comes to mind when I think of Rebecca/Josh in a romantic context is their adorable dancing in “California Christmastime,” because they both look like they’re having such a blast.  My second reason is that I love how they build each other up and believe the best in one another.  On the surface, Josh is cool and confident, but he has his insecurities like any other character on the show, and he places so much value on the fact that Rebecca believes in him.  And so often, when Rebecca has been self-doubting or self-berating, just when she thinks she’s lost her last shot with Josh, he responds with kindness and understanding.  Although this aspect of their relationship would change a little once they start relating to one another in a more clear-eyed manner – Rebecca wouldn’t have the same dreamy adoration for Josh, and Josh would have to contend with the full extent of Rebecca’s insecurities – but I think the core of it would remain the same, which is something both of them need.