Tuesday, November 5, 2019

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.

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