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.