Friday, August 5, 2016

Favorite Scene Friday! Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: West Covina

We don't feature scenes from TV all that often for Favorite Scene Friday. In fact, I think we've only highlighted clips from True Detective, Breaking Bad, Community, Seinfeld, and Arrested Development. It's my humble opinion, but I think all of those can be considered some of the best TV shows ever made. So for a show to get featured for FSF, it's gotta be good.


Crazy Ex-Girlfriend follows Rebecca Bunch (national treasure Rachel Bloom), a New York attorney who abruptly quits her job and moves to California to pursue a relationship with her ex-boyfriend, Josh Chan (crazy, right?). That's exactly what we see here - Rachel breaks into song, hops on a plane (in animated form, no less) and winds up in her crush's hometown. And that's what this particular musical number is about: the very strip-mally West Covina, California, the so called "Pride of the Inland Empire". It's quick to see that West Covina, while not necessarily worse than New York, isn't any better. Unless you've moved there for love (and/or are insane). The dirty sidewalk appears beautiful to Rebecca and noisy traffic is merely the sounds of "a bustling town". But as "West Covina" points out, Rebecca's kind of in denial about why she left New York. Josh "just happens to be" in West Covina, Rebecca explains -  a place she moved to because she wanted to change her life.

Not only is there lots to be heard in this scene for the obvious reasons, there's lots of great visual details. Notice that Rachel's hair is straight when she's in New York and when she arrives in California it's a bit curlier. Her dress has also become bedazzled. There's also the bits in New York where Rachel blocks some letters in a sign for goulash so that it spells gosh and then the same thing happens for Josh.

There are so many other great, funny and weird things in this scene. The anime wigs. The visit to the strip club (I guess she was expecting Josh to be there for some reason?). The exchange between Rachel and one of the movers, whom Rachel speaks to in English and then in Spanish. And then there's the big dance number at the end. The marching band getting cut is a great callback to earlier in the scene, as is the giant pretzel. And the "Only two hours from the beach!" line is a running gag referencing the fact that, for a California town, West Covina really isn't that close to the beach at all. It's just one of the many great running gags in the show.

Beth Morrell

I won't lie, this is probably the biggest musical number of the entire season. I think the pilot had a bigger budget because the show was originally produced for Showtime. But that doesn't mean the rest of the songs are bad. In fact, they're all pretty great and unique. So check out Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It just happens to be great.

What's your favorite scene from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend?

What's your favorite musical?


  1. I'm about 5 episodes in and I like this show so much more than I expected. I honestly had written it off because it just sounded like it was going to be annoying. However I do like musicals and the humor in this works quite well! This is definitely the best number so far because of how huge it is and it really made me see just how well this show was going to work.

  2. I was surprised at how much I liked it as well. I think I'd heard about it for a while, and then a few months ago it was advertised as being free on iTunes (I think it was up for some awards at the time) so we got into it. I think it's great because its pretty dark and also honest about relationships and stuff. I'm hoping Season 2 starts off with a huge musical number similar to this one. Thanks for reading and commenting!

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