The first season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend explained the show’s entire premise in its animated opening title sequence, with protagonist Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) delivering the details in a breathless patter: “I …. was … working hard at a New York job making dough but it made me blue/ One day I was crying a lot and so I decided to move to/ West Covina, California, brand new pals and new career/ It happens to be where Josh lives/ But that’s not why I’m here …” Like the show itself, a musical rom-com that set out to challenge musical rom-com tropes, the theme song was at once cutesy and subversive, with Rebecca, in denial about her own motivations, even rejecting the show’s very title as “a sexist term.”
Each subsequent season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has, to some extent, reinvented the show, so it makes sense that the title sequence would evolve with every new version. Season 2 gave us the best of the bunch, “I’m Just a Girl in Love,” a chipper, Busby Berkeley-inspired number with some ominous foreshadowing baked into its lyrics and a final frame that lingers just a moment longer than we’re comfortable with. The opener of Season 3, the season that dug the deepest into Rebecca’s mental illness, skewered pop music’s conflicting messages about what makes a woman “crazy” and whether it’s something to achieve or avoid.
It’s fitting, then, that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s fourth and final season has a new theme song to match, premiering exclusively on Slate. “Meet Rebecca” opens on “the coolest girl in the world,” a smiling, blue-eyed brunette merrily biking down a lane, looking like she’s got it all figured out—but then the camera pans to the real, less glamorous Rebecca, sitting on a nearby park bench. The singers quickly recover from the misunderstanding by attempting to describe Rebecca over a montage of clips from the show’s four seasons: looking perky and adorable, slurping up “love droplets” like a hamster, bursting into a church in a wedding dress to confront Josh, and heading off to jail in a jumpsuit.
Is Rebecca “spunky, sweet, a generous friend” or is she actually kind of mean? To borrow a phrase from an earlier season’s theme song, the situation is a lot more nuanced than that, so the singers eventually just give up: “Meet Rebecca! She’s too hard to summarize, so let’s go back to other Rebecca!” I have a feeling this isn’t the last we’ve heard from Deborah.
