Abstract
This chapter untangles Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s (The CW 2015–2019) several strands of crudity and overall offensiveness to make the case for the show’s complex commentary on postfeminism and contemporary media culture. Rather than looking at its musical interludes or comic elements as clashing with the show’s exploration of feminist issues, the chapter positions these as essential to the biting critique that has made this portmanteau-hyphen television outlier—a female-lead dramedy-cringe-musical series—a critical, if not commercial success. It outlines the show’s critique of ‘abject postfeminism’, before tracing its rejection of the romanticizing of ‘crazy women’ in US-American popular culture. Exemplary readings of select scenes detail how the series employs different levels of offence to push the limits of female representation in contemporary television.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The abusive patterns celebrated in romantic comedies made headlines, when a study proofed they normalize stalking (Beck 2016).
- 3.
In a flashback at the end of season two, this expression is revealed to be a quote from Rebecca’s mother, Naomi (Tovah Feldshuh), and originally used in court, when Rebecca was tried for arson—which retrospectively puts a much darker spin on the Busby Berkeley-evoking opening credits (S02 E13).
- 4.
One of the seminal postfeminist texts, Ally McBeal (Fox 1997–2002), not only prefigures CXG’s basic premise—a young, bright lawyer pining after an unavailable former boyfriend—but also anticipates the lead character’s withdrawal ‘into her inner world delusions’, which are usually accompanied by music, yet—in contrast to CXG—‘ultimately romanticized’ (Sandars 2006, 204).
- 5.
This self-description is taken from opening credits of season two.
- 6.
In this regard, the series most akin to CXG is Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which ‘resembles a Nickelodeon tween show—which is just how its heroine might imagine her own life. Yet, without any contradiction, it’s also a sitcom about a rape survivor’ (Nussbaum 2015). Not incidentally, Unbreakable, offers a similar combination of low humour and complex television (cf. Havas 2016).
- 7.
Paula’s delivery of sugary sweet songs to package ‘too real for comfort’—descriptions of bodily functions is repeated in ‘Miracle of Birth’ (‘explosive diarrhea / Means that labor’s drawing nearer’), which nonetheless takes serious both Paula’s joy in motherhood and Heather’s apprehensiveness before her first birth (S03 E13).
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Horn, K. (2019). ‘Period Sex’: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and the Feminist Politics of Offence. In: Graefer, A. (eds) Media and the Politics of Offence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17574-0_7
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