How <em>Crazy Ex-Girlfriend</em> Revived the TV Musical—And Liberated Its Heroine
By all accounts, 2015 was a make-or-break moment for musical shows on television. Glee finally fizzled out, three years after The Atlantic’s Kevin Fallon declared that “the TV-musical experiment has failed.” In his 2012 piece, Fallon argued that campy programs such as Glee and Smash had squandered their promising starts, dropping in terms of both quality and ratings. Smash ended in 2013 after just two seasons, but Glee kept trying in vain to recapture its old magic. When the show finally wrapped, in March 2015, it was easy to conclude that if a TV musical watched by more than 13 million people in its prime couldn’t make it, nothing else could.
Mere months later, arrived on The CW. A fresh take on the comedy musical, the series introduced Rebecca Bunch (played by Rachel Bloom), a high-flying lawyer and self-proclaimed feminist. At the start of the show, she uprooted her life in New York to
