I have a habit of compulsively breaking out into song. If I recognize a song in a bar, restaurant, grocery store, or Sephora, I quickly start singing along. Sometimes I don’t even need music; my tendency to constantly make pop-culture references compels me to think of the perfect track to match the moment I’m living, and I can’t help but belt it out. So of course, after I left the appointment where my psychiatrist confirmed that I had ADHD, a song burst out of me like a reflex: “A Diagnosis,” from the TV series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
On October 12, 2015, The CW premiered Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna’s tongue-in-cheek musical comedy about Rebecca Bunch (Bloom), a hot-shot lawyer looking for a fresh start by moving to West Covina, California—which just so happens to be where her summer-camp ex-boyfriend Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III) lives. Over four seasons, the show transformed into an astute, devastating, still-musical, surprisingly-poop-joke-filled character study, following Rebecca’s emotional highs and lows until eventually getting diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in season 3. 10 years later, the series stands as not only a marvel of television, but also as one of the most innovative, empathetic musicals about mental illness ever written.
