When Emmy Award-winning comedian Rachel Bloom called me in September, she was standing outside a nail salon in Los Angeles. Large trucks bellowed in the distance.
“I look very cool right now,” she joked. “Apologies if you hear the noise of Sunset Boulevard in the background.”
It was a fittingly chaotic salutation from the writer, who in the 2010s charmed TV audiences with her musical dramedy “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” Over four seasons, the musical sitcom racked up Emmys, Golden Globes and other awards, and to this day, the show maintains a cult following of megafans. Bloom’s humour is unique for its vulgarity — the actress is unafraid to talk in great detail about bodily fluids and their possible applications — but at the centre of Bloom’s jokes about saliva and snot lie big ideas about mental health, motherhood and feminism.
In her new standup special, aptly titled “Death, Let Me Do My Special,” Bloom recalls the most traumatic moments of the pandemic, from her newborn daughter’s stay in the NICU in March of 2020 to the unrelated deaths of a handful of close friends, including frequent collaborator Adam Schlesinger, in the following months.
Pandemic wounds might seem unlikely standup fodder, but in the special, Bloom leverages her trademark wit and irreverence to move through the pain of the last few years. Following a successful standup tour to a handful of theatres in the U.S., Bloom filmed the special for Netflix at Williamstown Theatre Festival this summer — thanks to a summer training program for theatre critics, I got to see the show live — and the special hit streaming on Oct. 15.
“It was hard going into a 30-minute monologue about the worst week of my life every night,” shared Bloom. “There was a period when it was cathartic — doing the show forced me to work out some s—t, and think about grief, and loss and death. So there was a purging, a catharsis in doing it over and over again four years after this all happened.
“I’ve now told this story so many times,” she continued. “I don’t need to purge it anymore. It feels right that this special is coming out, and that this chapter of my creative life is coming to a close. It feels correct.”
A lot’s changed for Bloom since the days of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”; having a child has completely reframed her outlook on life. In “Death, Let Me Do My Special,” Bloom imagines death as a heckler, and wonders aloud how her daughter might feel if ever she were to lose her parents; she wrestles, too, with how much to share about her daughter before she’s old enough to determine her relationship with the spotlight for herself.
“It all goes over her head,” said Bloom. One song in the special explores the Rainbow Bridge, a popular fable for pet owners that suggests our departed pets will wait for us in the afterlife until we, too, pass away. “She’s seen the Rainbow Bridge song … but she thinks I have a whole show that’s literally about a bridge made of rainbows,” Bloom said, laughing.
“I rarely feel like I’ve exposed too much, or shared too much,” she continued. “But when you have a kid, it’s weird, because I made her, and she lived in me. In some ways, her experience is my experience, so it feels like the stories I share about her are an aspect of myself. But no, she has autonomy, she’s a real person. So there’s always been a debate for me: Where is that line?
“I’m much more worried about sharing photos of my daughter on social media than of my own vagina,” she joked. “Because I can consent to that.”
The road to Netflix was by no means straightforward; according to Bloom, she received multiple offers to write a standup special when “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” came to a close. At the time, she assumed those opportunities would still be there in a few years.
“They weren’t,” she recalled. “The special market completely collapsed. Netflix came in at the eleventh hour — I always knew I was going to film it somehow, but Netflix signed on after the off-Broadway run.” By the time Netflix came on board, the show was fully formed in all its tonal dissonance between campy jokes about periods and poignant meditations on friendship.
“(Schlesinger) was very, very allergic to being overly sentimental to the point where the work would become saccharine or gross,” she said. “That tonal debate was always in the special, and it changed a lot in two and a half years. It’s a process and an imprecise science. But Netflix has been very supportive of the tone from the beginning. There is no note I’ve gotten from Netflix that I disagree with.”
Bloom hopes the special resonates with audiences still reeling from the pandemic — which is far from over, she added.
“I still have people saying, ‘Oh my god, thank you for saying the word COVID,’” she said. “Because collectively, we want to forget. And that’s what the show is about. It’s the balance of acknowledging death and continuing to live — moving forward, but not forgetting that all these people died.”
