'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend': Crazy-Inventive, Crazy-Risky

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, premiering on Monday on The CW, is one of the rare new fall shows that deserves to be praised effusively, but with reservations attached. An hour-long musical-comedy with a bright, candy-colored outside and a solid core of feminism inside? Yes, please: bring it on. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend stars YouTube celeb Rachel Bloom as a lovelorn New York City attorney who, after running into a guy she had a crush on a decade earlier, drops her emotionally empty Manhattan life to follow him across the country in the hope of rekindling a romance in California.

Does that make Bloom’s Rebecca Bunch sound desperate, perhaps a little, as the title says, crazy? Ah, that’s what show creators Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna (writer of the Devil Wears Prada movie script) want to play around with — the cultural assumptions that when a woman does something spontaneous yet with determination, she must be wacky, a little off, maybe even c-c-c-crazy. (Guys, in this cultural stereotype, usually get labeled “eccentric” or simply “romantic.”)

The pilot episode is pretty much a non-stop pleasure, packed with funny scenes and big, billowy musical numbers. If, as the central figure in a new show, Bloom seems unusual — she doesn’t have the kind of conventional leading-woman demeanor we’re used to in a TV star — that ends up being part of her appeal, and she certainly has the comic instincts and musical power of a Broadway star.

So what are my reservations mentioned up at the top? Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is exactly the kind of show that could have a great pilot and then quickly drop off in quality in succeeding weeks. That’s because of the show’s ambitions. To mount a mini-musical every week, from two co-creators who haven’t overseen a TV show before — that would be a tall order for even more experienced television producers. Obviously, there’s a lot of extra work involved in maintaining this show with songs and choreography and sets to match the big production numbers of the pilot. Crazy also has a little bit of the preciousness of Bryan Fuller’s Pushing Daisies — vivid-hued whimsy that can become tiresomely cute if the tone isn’t impeccably balanced.

So Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is an admirable calculated risk. The CW needs to take those kinds of risks; the network needs to do something more than rely on producer Greg Berlanti to give it super-hero hits (Arrow; The Flash).

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a perfect time-period match with Jane The Virgin (which starts its second season tonight), though it might be better if Crazy followed Jane instead of leading off the night — asking the rookie Crazy to compete with Big Bang Theory, Dancing with the Stars, and The Voice? Now, that’s a bit crazy. Best of luck to this new show.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend airs Mondays at 8 p.m. on The CW.