Quietly and without much notice, last fall the CW network aired what was most likely broadcast television’s first-ever depiction of anal waxing. The scene, on the show “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” was not explicit, yet neither was it ambiguous. A young woman in her bathroom, wearing a short robe, leans forward and then reaches toward her backside with a wax strip in her hand. There is the sound of something ripping, a scream and then a cut to the spattering of blood on the side of the tub, like a shot from a slasher flick in which all the horror is implied.  The young woman, or victim, performing this particular bit of predate grooming is Rebecca Bunch, a determined, if deluded, lawyer-in-love played by Rachel Bloom, the 28-year-old star and an executive producer of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” Rebecca has ditched her high-paying job in New York to relocate to West Covina, Calif. She tells herself, and everyone else, that she has moved for a more laid-back lifestyle, but in fact she is there to pursue Josh Chan, a skateboarding, underemployed bro she once dated at summer camp (played by Vincent Rodriguez III).  Earlier this month, Bloom’s show won her a Golden Globe for best actress in a television comedy or musical. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is both: a mordant, modern comedy and a twinkling, cheery musical. But the show alternates its semi-sincere musical-theater tributes with slick, contemporary music videos that satirize their genre. The anal-waxing shot, for example, flies by in a video called “The Sexy Getting Ready Song,” a sultry R&B number in which MTV-style backup singers pout and preen with bleach on their upper lips. In some scenes, Rebecca appears looking music-video hot, while in others she lays bare the hard labor required to make women look that good, plucking and tweezing, squeezing into flesh-tone Spanx, singeing her neck with a curling iron.  The series mixes the occasional Shakespeare reference with heart-tugging show tunes and anal-sex jokes, yet it hangs together with a distinct sensibility. Just how much of its humor reflects Bloom’s own — goofy, whip smart, absurdist — became clear at the Golden Globes, where Bloom made the most of her time on the red carpet. For one reporter, she improvised a quick song about all her new famous friends (singing, “All my old friends who aren’t famous — you’re garbage”). She licked her Golden Globe trophy. “It tastes like winning,” she told a reporter from E! Online. “And power. And the Illuminati.” She was excited to join the Illuminati, she said. “I can’t wait to shove a sharp stick through someone and roast them over a fire with Meryl Streep.”  “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” was a show decades in the making, at least subconsciously for Bloom, who grew up “thinking either about musical theater or murder and death,” she told me. That the show would be overtly irreverent about taboos, including sex, was a given. “Rachel is the dirtiest person I know,” her friend Danny Jolles, a comedian in Los Angeles, said with evident pride. “She has asked me more about my sexual preferences than any other person I know. She has me mapped to a T.”  In person, Bloom comes across as someone who takes honesty to its natural conclusion. “I like deconstructing things,” she told me when we met in December for dinner near her bungalow home in Los Angeles. “I like cutting the legs out from under something that feels secret. Something that’s like — ‘Oh, breasts are sexy.’ They’re floppy, Jell-O-filled sacks! In high school, I was once watching the surgery channel and ended up watching a breast reduction. The inside of a breast is disgusting. It looks like the inside of a couch.”  There’s something almost earnest about Bloom’s desire to discuss the realities of biology — sexual, anatomical or otherwise — that the rest of humanity tries so hard to gloss over. Potty-mouthed in her work, off-camera she has a vulnerable quality; several women on the set said they felt maternal toward Bloom, who looks even younger than her age and is decidedly polite. Lipstick and a form-fitting dress can easily transform her into an old-fashioned bombshell, but she showed up for dinner (as she often does for meetings) in a shapeless, forgettable sweatshirt and jeans, makeup-free. She shows equally little vanity on the show. During a scene in which Rebecca runs into Josh at a grocery store, Bloom wears an oversize T-shirt without a bra, her breasts loose and low, no longer packaged for maximum appeal. (“Bras are in Aisle 1,” one of Josh’s male friends tells her.)  The show regularly sends up expectations of female beauty but also takes on, for example, the complicated rivalries in certain kinds of relationships between women. “I want to kill you and wear your skin like a dress, but then also have you see me in the dress and be like, ‘OMG, you look so cute in my skin!’ ” Rebecca sings about Josh’s current girlfriend, whom she has momentarily befriended, in a number called “Feeling Kinda Naughty.”  “My standards are based on shows I like, like ‘Girls’ or ‘Arrested Development,’ ” Bloom said. “And they’re all shows that are groundbreaking. I guess in the back of my head, I think, If you’re not being groundbreaking, then what are you doing? If you’re not being ballsy and honest and vulgar” — to her, the last two are impossible to separate — “then what are you doing?”  Bloom grew up in Manhattan Beach, Calif., her father a health care lawyer, her mother a musically gifted amateur pianist. Her family encouraged her interest in theater, and Bloom took endless singing and acting classes, hoping to become a Broadway star. Once she enrolled at New York University, majoring in musical theater, she took in the competition and feared that her dream was a long shot; rather than giving all she had to a field that might break her heart, she threw her energy into sketch comedy, about which she had no preconceived expectations, performing with a campus group and taking classes at Upright Citizens Brigade’s comedy school.  The braininess and irreverence of the craft suited Bloom, a top-of-her-class English student who chose “The Exorcist” as the subject of her eighth-grade book project. She did not immediately realize that her musical talent could make her sketch work more original. “She had been trying to make a break from musical theater to expand her horizons,” said Dan Gregor, her husband, a comedy writer and actor she met at N.Y.U. “But once she made peace with the fact that she had this very special skill set, the dots started connecting.”  After graduation, Bloom used some savings and earnings from odd jobs to make her first video, “[Expletive] Me Ray Bradbury,” which showcased a young girl’s sexual desire for the “greatest sci-fi writer in history.” In the video, Bloom sings and dances with the skill of a viable pop star, with braids and a skimpy blouse like the one that Britney Spears wore to great effect in “ ... Baby One More Time.” Bloom appears in other shots as an unadorned nerd, retainer in mouth, who seems to be masturbating with a copy of “The Illustrated Man” in hand.  The video, which she posted on YouTube in 2010, and which the popular website “Funny or Die” put on its home page, went viral, with nearly three million views on YouTube to date. Around the same time, Bloom moved to Los Angeles, landing TV-writing gigs (with Cartoon Network’s “Robot Chicken,” among others). She continued making her own videos, like one called “Historically Accurate Disney Princess Song,” in which a singing cartoon princess coughs up blood that, on her handkerchief, takes the sparkling shape of a prince’s face. The cartoon princess greets the “blacksmith with his daughter-wife” and chats gaily with Jews who are cowering for cover in the forest.  That was the first Rachel Bloom video that Aline Brosh McKenna, the screenwriter of “The Devil Wears Prada,” clicked on while procrastinating one day back in the spring of 2013. McKenna arranged to meet Bloom, and the two quickly agreed on the premise of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which McKenna had been toying with as a film idea for years. Showtime bought the pilot but declined to go forward, at which point the CW — best known lately for a lineup including “America’s Next Top Model” and “iZombie” — picked up the show. McKenna and Bloom had always called their project “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which might have played as a meta-joke on Showtime; on the CW, it seemed to hint at a show that would rely on sexist clichés, a perception that may help explain its low ratings so far.  On “Girls” and “Broad City,” shows whose success surely influenced the CW’s decision to air “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” sexual explicitness seems to reflect the young writers’ generational impulse to share all. On “Broad City,” Ilana Glazer’s character is depicted having sex with a man while simultaneously talking via FaceTime with her best friend; Lena Dunham, on “Girls,” reveals both body and soul. Bloom, who roomed with Glazer after college for more than a year in New York, shares those female artists’ utter lack of self-consciousness about the body and sexuality, but she uses both for stylized jokes, not necessarily for gritty, hyperreal representations of mating in the 21st century.  Bloom and her female peers’ work reflects pop culture’s inexorable direction toward the more overt; but McKenna also credits the fearlessness of Bloom’s work, in part, to YouTube, which allowed her to reach an audience without first needing a stamp of approval from a corporate higher-up. “When I made my way, every step of the way, I had to get somebody who reported to somebody who reported to somebody to give me a shot,” McKenna said. “That was almost always a man, but that’s almost besides the point. What Rachel did was just take her own money and put up her work in an unmitigated way. And she still thinks of herself that way. She hasn’t internalized all the rules and governors.”  One evening, Bloom and Jack Dolgen, a songwriter and scriptwriter for her show, were talking in a recording space at Occidental Studios in L.A., where she was getting ready to record a song called “Cold Showers,” which spoofs genre songs like “Trouble” from “The Music Man.” The recording would be used the next day, when she would shoot the musical number. Dolgen informed Bloom that a lyric involving someone taking call girls to the Olive Garden had been nixed by some corporate overlord.  “Wait — what, no call girls?” she said. Someone explained that the reference could be interpreted as disparaging to the restaurant. Her face fell. She cursed. “That’s the joke,” she said. “What about child prostitutes? Can we say 7-year-old child prostitutes? For the record, I love Olive Garden.” There were other disappointments: She had been hoping for a giant song-and-dance number with dozens of dancers around a pool, but the line producer had budgeted for only about 10. “That’s pitiful,” Bloom said. She wondered half-seriously if she could pay out of her own pocket for more, the way she did when she was making videos on her own.  “The bigger your budget, the less you can do,” Dolgen said. He started riffing about the cost of another scene they were planning, a song called “Group Hang,” about a date Rebecca plans with Josh that is ruined when he brings along his friends. Dolgen put on the British accent of the show’s beloved line producer. “Can we make ‘Group Hang’ a solo hang?” he said. “It’s cheaper. And we just have you, and we don’t have to pay anyone.”  “Could we have ‘Group Hang’ take place in purgatory?” Bloom said; her own English accent had more cockney in it. “There’s no people — it’s just we film it in a white space. And it’s like that Philip Glass piece that’s four minutes of someone not playing piano.”  Dolgen: “The magic is in the silence.”  Bloom went appropriately silent for a moment, considering Dolgen’s bad British accent, which was evolving with every word he spoke. “You’re kind of turning a little bit into Dr. Evil,” she said. “You’re also turning into, like … a gay Nazi.”  They had indulged in what was for them the most productive form of resistance; now it was time to record “Cold Showers.” In the song, Rebecca urges Josh’s neighbors to join him in a lawsuit against their landlord, arguing that unreliable access to hot water would be their children’s moral downfall — just as a pool hall would be for the children in “The Music Man.” A typical line, sung by the chorus: “Cold showers are the gateway drug to craaaaaack!” Rehearsing before she started recording the song, Bloom brightened considerably. “I can’t believe,” she said to no one in particular, “someone’s letting us do this.”  “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” often contrasts Rebecca’s professional competence with her personal vulnerabilities, including her desperation for friends of any kind, a theme drawn from Bloom’s own childhood. A high-strung only child, she was raised by what she describes as “neurotic Jewish parents.” Bloom never felt at home in the absurdly sunny environment of Southern California, where “it was basically illegal,” she said, “to be depressed.”  Bloom was talking about her childhood in the courtyard of an apartment complex where she would be filming “Cold Showers.” Usually Rebecca is dressed stylishly for work, but that day, for the song spoof, Bloom was wearing a maroon pantsuit, which vaguely evoked Robert Preston in “The Music Man.” The crew was testing sound levels, and the recording Bloom made — the one linking cold water with crack use by kids — blared so loudly that all conversation briefly paused. “Only children are weird,” Bloom said. “The only children I know, including myself, are either superweird or very talented and special or a mix of the two,” she continued. “I think there was always a certain independence and loneliness — I had a lot of imaginary friends as a kid.”  When not taking singing or dancing lessons, Bloom spent most of her time playing a computer game called RollerCoaster Tycoon or hanging out with her parents, who she said were a bit eccentric: Even in Manhattan Beach, they walked everywhere, including along major thoroughfares. Her parents’ home décor, Bloom said, is dominated by large portraits of their only child and by Disney-themed artworks, one depicting Mickey and Minnie on a moonlit dock and another of a post-apocalyptic Disneyland. When she was young, Bloom knew that she was not fitting in with other children, but she didn’t understand why. She cut her own bangs, badly, and went to school in baggy sweatpants and oversize novelty T-shirts well into seventh grade.  Performing “Adelaide’s Lament,” a comedic classic from “Guys and Dolls,” at the school lip-syncing contest did not offer the pathway to popularity in Southern California that Bloom, as an 11-year-old, thought it might. “I was made fun of a lot in middle school,” she said. “When I was in seventh grade, the popular kids paid the most popular guy to ask me out.” She still recalls the elaborateness of the public humiliation, the crowds watching, the money being exchanged, all of it something out of a particularly tragic, even clichéd after-school special.  Bloom’s work frequently draws on painful evocations of that aching loneliness and a fear of “being considered weird and strange,” according to her husband. “I think that everyone feels those things,” he said. “It’s just that Rachel is particularly adept at tapping into it.” One of Bloom’s self-produced YouTube videos is called “I Steal Pets,” about a desperate-to-be-liked, awkward girl who steals pets from popular people and dresses them up “like the popular people.”  Looking back, Bloom thinks that her classmates were picking up on something that no one else, including her, recognized at the time, which was that she was dealing with some fairly significant mental-health problems. “I had pretty severe anxiety and depression and what I think was O.C.D.,” she said. “I had looping compulsive thoughts based around sexual shame — by the way, that didn’t come from my parents. If anything, they erred on the side of being superopen about sex. But it was like, any sexual thought, I’d have looping thoughts about what that meant. It was sex shame, body shame, dirt shame.” Bloom still suffers from bouts of anxiety.  The show takes the concept of craziness and examines it with episodes of both farce (Rebecca Bunch, high, trying to break into her shrink’s home via a doggy door) and utter seriousness. Rebecca’s West Covina law-firm boss tells her, when she melts down in a meeting, to come back Monday as “the happy Rebecca that we all know and love.” “Such a good tip,” she responds. “ ‘Be happy.’ ”  By the time Bloom got to high school, the worst of her O.C.D. had passed, she thinks, and her talent as a performer was also gaining respect from her fellow students. But as Daniel Green, a close friend Bloom has known since they dated in high school, put it, “Do you ever really shed your middle-school persona?” Green, who is now an internist, was on set that day at the apartment complex, visiting Bloom and watching her shoot. By the time he started dating her in 11th grade, people were still commenting on the red, glittery Dorothy-in-Oz slippers she wore every day for close to a year in elementary school. “People were always saying, ‘I can’t believe how talented she is — she was so weird!’ ” Green said. “That was always the second half of the sentence.”  As a makeup artist applied gloss to Bloom’s lips on the set, Bloom turned to Green and asked, “What does the inside of a body smell like?” “Not much,” he answered. Bloom thought for a moment, then asked, “When you look at Jennifer Lawrence, do you see a pretty girl, or just a walking sack of guts?”  To Green, the character Bloom was playing — a bright, high-functioning professional with an ingenuous, unedited oddness — is not that different from the person she was in high school, and still is, so far as he could tell. “I don’t think she lies to herself quite as much as Rebecca does,” he said. “She might amp the volume up, but she’s the same person.”  Perhaps a childhood like Bloom’s can produce an unusually bold person. So what if someone doesn’t like her act, or thinks she’s vulgar, gross or weird for imagining someone sexually fantasizing about Ray Bradbury? What’s the worst that could happen — someone might mock her? She has been through that before. Or perhaps Bloom was always fearless; maybe there was a rawness, or an otherness, to her as a young child that her peers could not then tolerate, but that adults, who eventually come into their own sense of mortality and misery, now enjoy watching her explore through her show. Whatever the reason, Bloom is invariably described as brave by her friends and colleagues, both in her curiosity and in her creativity. “Sometimes I get to improvise with her,” Pete Gardner, who plays her boss, says. “And I love doing it. Because when I look into her eyes, I see no fear.”  By the end of the day, Bloom was shooting some final scenes of the “Cold Showers” song at an outdoor pool at the apartment complex. She was supposed to swan dive off the side of the pool onto a small raft that would drift a foot or two in the water in front of a line of dancers on the edge of the pool. The light was fading, and there was some back and forth about what would happen if Bloom missed the raft. The director wanted her to weigh in on where to position the camera. She thought about it, with dozens of people waiting on her call. A chill was already in the air. Bloom had her face in her hands as she tried to concentrate. “Let’s do it proscenium-style,” she finally said. “I can be on the float and be facing them on my stomach.” A crew member called out, “Let’s just go, we gotta go!”  The chorus, an assortment of the show’s regulars and others cast to play Josh’s neighbors, was singing words about crack and cold water that made no sense (even though the lyrics also include the line, “This makes sense!”). Then Bloom belted: “Gasp with an uppercase G, that ends with P, the first letter in ‘pool.’ ” At that point, she threw her hands in the air and dove, Superman-style. Bloom landed squarely on the raft, sailing into the middle of the pool. She could just as easily have missed, flailing in front of all those people and getting soaking wet, her pale blue silk shirt transparent. She had already considered that possibility. “It’ll be funny,” she said. “It might even be better.”  Susan Dominus is a staff writer for the magazine. She last wrote about Elisabeth Elliot, a missionary to Ecuador who died in 2015.
Rachel Bloom’s subversive series — which just won her a Golden Globe — somehow manages to set women’s uncomfortable truths to music.