Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Rachel Bloom: Death, Let Me Do My Special’ On Netflix, Where The ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ Star Tries To Move On After The Death of Her Songwriting Partner

Rachel Bloom just wanted to take her silly musical comedy show on the road and film it for a special at the end of 2019. But 2020 brought the COVID pandemic , and within weeks, Bloom was mourning the loss of multiple people close to her. How could she joke at a time like this? How can anyone talk openly about death and make it funny? Perhaps a song or two or more can do the trick.

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The Gist: Bloom had just given birth to her first child, a daughter, as the pandemic lockdowns began in March 2020. Suddenly her newborn had suffered complications, born with fluid in her lungs, and put on a ventilator, separated from Bloom. Her Emmy-winning songwriting collaborator, Adam Schlesinger, also was on a ventilator, but on the opposite coast, stricken with COVID. Bloom’s baby survived, but Schlesinger did not .

And not long after, Bloom’s dresser from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend succumbed to cancer, and her psychiatrist dropped dead from a heart attack at only 44 years old.

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Bloom’s dog, and her impending motherhood, already found her facing mortality, but this was a bit much, even or perhaps especially for an atheist. Why couldn’t she just do comedy as if it were still 2019?

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Bloom’s show obviously will remind you of what you enjoyed about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend , but as a solo (or even as a two-hander). Her musical comedy here may fall under the same genre as Cat Cohen or Matt Rogers , but her style and sincerity fit even more in line with Mike Birbiglia , with whom Bloom shares a common director in Seth Barrish.

Memorable Jokes: It’s not all gloom and doom from Bloom.

In fact she opens with a little ditty she wrote imagining a century-old ode to the oddly-smelling Bradford Pear tree.

But she’s quickly heckled. And the heckler is Death personified. By none other than David Hull, the character actor who played “White Josh” on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend . He “forces” Bloom to confront the reality of how death and grief have affected her comedy and her outlook.

Not that she needed the grim reaper nudging her.

She jokes about how “pregnancy made me do the math” in 2020 to calculate when the dog she and her husband owned would die (the dog was still alive and barking at 14 when Bloom filmed this special). It didn’t help that the business manager they hired somehow fooled a pet insurance company to think their dog already had died.

But the whole thing inspires a song about when her dog eventually crosses over that “Rainbow Bridge.” Other songs cover her daughter’s stint in NICU, her hopes for a ghastly haunting, a tune about another kind of smelly tree, and a duet with Death.

Death even gets his own song, with Hull momentarily in the spotlight for what also turns out to be a searing parody of Dear Evan Hansen .

Our Take: Since the pandemic, Bloom has entered the next chapter of her professional career with supporting roles in shows such as Julia , Reboot , and most recently in the new season of the Frasier reboot.

But Bloom is still best known for her musical dramedy that aired on The CW and won her a Golden Globe, TCA, Critics Choice and Emmy. She shared the Emmy for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics for the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend song, “Antidepressants Are So Not A Big Deal,” which she co-wrote with Schlesinger. It’s a big deal that Bloom chose to film her special at Williams College, the quaint Western Massachusetts school where Schlesinger and his fellow students formed his power-pop band, Fountains of Wayne.

It’s also a big deal to make Death an actual character in the show.

Although it’s funny in a darkly cynical way that Bloom initially tried to play off her “heckler” as a mere opportunity for TikTok content to promote Especially since Netflix would then do just that.

But as Bloom also points out earlier in her show, the concept of death somehow feels un-American. “We are taught from a young age,” she says, to instead embrace a “blind optimism” that nothing can stop us. Death literally stops us. All of us.

Even when someone else dies, we can try to avoid it, but it’s a brutal reminder of our own mortality. For Bloom, who described herself here as an atheist, the string of deaths around her in 2020 did compel her to pray for her dear friend and colleague. When that didn’t seem to work, she hoped a psychic might connect her to Schlesinger to give her something to go on in the future. She might’ve had as much luck with a Magic 8-Ball. But her therapist did have some sage words for her.

Leaving Bloom to joke: “I will never know if God heard my prayers, but my psychiatrist did.”

And by writing and performing this special, Bloom is paying the therapeutic services forward to us. Whether we need it right now in this moment, or need it down the road.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Even if you’ve never seen an episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, you’ll get a lot out of seeing Bloom speak openly about grief while keeping it harmonious.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First .

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