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Ben X

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

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I've watched around 5 episodes of this. It has a fair amount of charm, but it lacks the sharpness of Tina Fey's shows which it hews closely to, and a fair amount of the humour falls flat.

 

Still enjoying it enough for the moment to keep going...

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Oh man I love it! 

 

I dont really consider it all that similar to Tina Fey shows. I would on balance take it over Kimmy Schmidt though.

 

It's true that it doesn't quite have the consistency it should, and it would probably be better served by shorter seasons allowing less filler. But I think it's worth sticking with. It's ultimately smarter than it pretends to be, which is a welcome reversal in modern television.

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10 hours ago, Chris said:

Oh man I love it! 

 

I dont really consider it all that similar to Tina Fey shows. I would on balance take it over Kimmy Schmidt though.

 

It's true that it doesn't quite have the consistency it should, and it would probably be better served by shorter seasons allowing less filler. But I think it's worth sticking with. It's ultimately smarter than it pretends to be, which is a welcome reversal in modern television.

 

I second all of this. Crazy Ex Girlfriend is one of only three shows (How to Get Away With Murder & New Girl being the other two) that I watch within 24 hours of them airing, and will watch them live if I can.

 

It's devastatingly funny & frank & honest. I think it has a lot more affection for its characters than the season of Kimmy Schmidt I watched ever did.

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I've watched 9 episodes now and I'm finding this fairly irritating - I'd probably have given up by now if my partner didn't enjoy it. I find a lot of the characters irritating and/or unpleasant, the storytelling is quite clunky and it's not really very funny. The musical numbers often feel underwhelming too - I think it's partly the writing (and I guess I can't expect too much when they're doing one or two every episode) and partly that they don't seem to have the budget/time for lots of camera moves and choreography so you often get a lot of flat, repetitive reaction shots and general staging.

 

One thing my partner and I do agree on is that awful title sequence - we skip it every time!

 

I really want to like this show; I'm hoping it'll tighten up before the end of the season.

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On 7/2/2017 at 2:49 AM, Ben X said:

One thing my partner and I do agree on is that awful title sequence - we skip it every time!

 

The last several seconds of Season 2's opening titles, however, rank among the best recurring moments ever committed to television:

 

 

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12 hours ago, Chris said:

 

The last several seconds of Season 2's opening titles, however, rank among the best recurring moments ever committed to television:

 

 

Ha ha ha, that is so much better!

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13 hours ago, Chris said:

 

The last several seconds of Season 2's opening titles, however, rank among the best recurring moments ever committed to television:

 

 

 

I laughed so hard at that final pause every single episode to the point where my wife got mad at me.. It's A++!!

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7 hours ago, BigJKO said:

 

I laughed so hard at that final pause every single episode to the point where my wife got mad at me.. It's A++!!

 

It killed us every single time. Amazing.

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I watched 9 episodes of the first season some time ago and then just sort of didn't press play on it anymore. I like many aspects of it, but it did not manage to get me hooked yet. One thing that worries me about the show is whether it moves forward at all. I know it's not what these types of shows are known for, but it seems that this show could be especially rough considering that the entire premise is her pining after Josh. I also wouldn't mind if the seasons were shorter, because I have a feeling (based on practically nothing) that the major story arcs within and between seasons would be similar regardless of the amount of episodes per season. Anyway, the show is really charming, and I will probably return to it at some point when there are less shows on my watch list.

 

What I'm actually here for is to say that the season 2 intro is amazing, especially compared with the first season. It's the opposite of people ruining Parks & Rec intro by desyncing the music and video during season 2 (?).

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The show actually does move forward, which is actually kind of shocking. By the end of Season 2 it has moved forward extremely dramatically. I agree that was really starting to feel like a risk, but they handle it I think very well. The main problem, and I agree with you here as well, is that there are simply too many episodes. It can't possibly sustain quality across big musical numbers when there have to be so many of them, and when the basic plot conceit relies on tension between specific characters. When it gets dragged out too much, it really weakens. Season 2 goes through a kind of a dry spell for this reason, but they get back into a groove.

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The second season actually has too few episodes, which leads to a lot of clunkiness in the middle. Right before they started filming on season 2, the episode order was cut, so the show jumps forward with a lot of major plot developments that you can tell they wanted to take more time with. They also didn't know if they were going to get renewed until very late in the season. Overall, it makes for a weaker season arc, but the show's minute-to-minute beats are so amazing. And the songs are really, really good.

 

 

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2 minutes ago, Argobot said:

The second season actually has too few episodes, which leads to a lot of clunkiness in the middle. Right before they started filming on season 2, the episode order was cut, so the show jumps forward with a lot of major plot developments that you can tell they wanted to take more time with. They also didn't know if they were going to get renewed until very late in the season. Overall, it makes for a weaker season arc, but the show's minute-to-minute beats are so amazing. And the songs are really, really good.

 

 

I still think season 2 dragged a bunch, especially with all that "new guy" stuff. I think they could have done the second season's arc a lot more efficiently. Maybe not half the number of episodes, but definitely fewer.

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Would you say that the quality picks up in the second half of season 1? Seems like Nappi and I both lost enthusiasm around the same point...

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On 7/7/2017 at 6:12 PM, Ben X said:

Would you say that the quality picks up in the second half of season 1? Seems like Nappi and I both lost enthusiasm around the same point...

 

Well, Ben, yes I would.

 

By the end of the first season, they've given a bit more depth to the characters (and White Josh's personality basically gets retconned from the original 'lol he's so stupid', which was a good move) and a lot of them get held to account for the crappy ways they've been acting, and they all started making decent life decisions and acting like adults. Also, perhaps I was just getting used to it, but the songs and direction of them seemed to improve. It may be that they realised they could get away with music video rather than musical a lot better with limited set-ups etc. There was still a bit too much humour where it feels like the actors were ad-libbing on set after watching Anchorman a few too many times, but generally it was getting funnier.

 

Having said all that, I'm watching the second season now and they're having to manufacture new drama, so it's back to the characters acting like teenagers and making really stupid decisions and plans. I think the main problem this show has is the jarring mix of storyline tone ranging from cartoon caper through tween soap opera ("my bff has other friends as well as me!") to adult drama (

Spoiler

alcoholism, depression, abortion

). Seinfeld worked with no redeemable or 'straight-man' characters and Arrested Development really started to work once Michael moved away from that role, because they had their tone nailed down; with CXG I flip between getting frustrated that the characters are learning life-lessons that they should have figured out ten years earlier, and getting frustrated because I'm watching a load of damaged people hurt themselves and everyone around them because of their debilitating psychological issues, either one of which could work on its own with the requisite balances but end up clashing with each other.

 

Anyway, obviously there's still lots of great and interesting stuff about this show because I'm still watching it and posting about it, but it really needs to figure out what it is and whether that can be sustained in an ongoing series.

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I feel like with all sitcoms you have to pretend everyone has some sort of head trauma. Unless the show has no interest in warmth or character growth or "lessons" (your examples of Seinfeld and Arrested Development) the emotional age of your average sitcom character is (18-x) where x= # of seasons the show's been on. By the end of Parks and Rec it mostly felt like a show about 12 year olds singing about friendship and hugging. I think that's probably just a necessity, both for the sake of plot contrivance and mass audience appeal.

 

But I can't think of a single comedy show interested in nurturing it's characters humanity where they don't come across as immature all the time. And I honestly think Crazy Ex-Girlfriend handles this better than most.

 

EDIT: I should say, I think this applies to American sitcoms. I haven't seen all that many British sitcoms but it wouldn't surprise me if there was less of this there, as I can immediately think of one show (The Office) where this isn't the case.

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