Lady Business: Crazy ladies and high-profile endings; More travel stories

Kudos to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend for sticking the landing of its funny, woke, quietly-raunchy-yet-deeply-thoughtful story.

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the sixty-fourth issue, published April 11, 2019.
 

Crazy Good Endings

 

Kudos to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the inclusively-feminist mental-health romantic musical comedy that just wrapped up its improbable four-year network television run, and to co-creators Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna. I was relieved by how much I enjoyed the finale this weekend, despite (or because of?) finding it eminently predictable. It takes a lot of skilled writerly tap-dancing to do a somewhat sincere Bachelor story that also mocks The Bachelor, and also refuses to provide a Bachelor ending, but also refuses to criticize you for wanting that Bachelor ending!
 
Which is the kind of (occasionally even literal!) tap-dancing that the show, at its best, excelled at. The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum calls out another quietly ambitious goal that Bloom and McKenna set for themselves -- and mostly, if not always perfectly, pulled off:
 

The final season reached for something that I’ve never seen a show pull off: dramatizing themes—among them repentance, sobriety, and humility—that are much harder to make more enjoyable than one girl’s madcap hunt for true love, let alone set to music.

 
It was also a refreshing break from Peak Antihero Drama. (Related: Must we again, Killing Eve?) Or at least, like The Good Place, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend did the Antihero Drama in reverse, starting with a moral mess of a person and managing to pin a funny, dramatic story on her struggle to become better (and, sure, probably more boring).
 
Maybe the greatest compliment I can give Bloom and McKenna is that, after watching the finale, I wanted to go back and rewatch older episodes of their show. That’s hard to accomplish! I’ve had entire television shows retroactively ruined by a bad finale. (Looking at you, Battlestar Galactica and The Good Wife. I still can’t watch The Good Fight, despite all the great press it’s gotten, thanks to the lingering sourness of The Good Wife’s bad end.)
 
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend never had a huge pop-culture reach -- or a huge budget. (I love this Lemonade parody, which includes lyrics about how expensive it was to film.) This last season, especially, often felt produced on a shoestring. The show’s signature musical numbers lost a lot of bells and whistles, while some of the storylines very much felt like the writers were checking off necessary plot points that, with more money and time, would have merited a few more episodes. (Remember when Paula had a heart attack? Which was never mentioned again? Or Rebecca’s sudden decision to leave the law to start a pretzel bakery… which she just as quickly abandoned to follow her last-minute songwriting dreams?)
 
But to the end, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend remained funny, woke, quietly raunchy, specific, and true to its writers’ visions  -- all while allowing its characters to grow, and to continue their stories once their show concludes. That’s an ending that sticks, in the best way.
 

Lady Bits

--Travel stories: Thanks so much for your responses to last week’s newsletter about traveling while female, with money and friends and without! Some additional stories: “It wasn’t a particularly remarkable incident or even the first time such an event has happened to me,” wrote Amanda, with a story about how an effort to save some taxi fare on a routine trip turned suddenly dangerous: “Would I have had any of these worries if I was a man?” Or as Bethany emailed, “Many of my favorite travel moments have been from traveling alone… but in all of these situations, I always have to research thoroughly, and I rarely feel comfortable going out on my own after dark (the time I picked up carryout and sat in my hotel room on a business trip immediately comes to mind).”
 
--Book Stuff: Thank you to Sara Connell for this email Q&A about my book, my writing advice and some of the other writers I admire, published on Thrive and Medium.
 
--Notre Dame women’s basketball head coach Muffet McGraw drew a lot of headlines for saying she would never again hire a male coach, but this ThinkProgress profile goes into so much more than the headline, including: the history of how Title IX actually hurt women’s abilities to get hired as college sports coaches; how it’s so much harder (always) for women of color to get the top jobs; and how petty sports rivalries can get (who blocked who on Twitter?!). Also mentioned in that profile, and discussed in depth in this InStyle piece: Why Do Female Basketball Coaches Wear Heels?
 
--“You can put organic bilberries or biodynamic sapodillas foraged by an elite cult of yodeling eunuchs into your product and slap a $20 price tag on it, for all the United States government cares, but what’s inside had better be ice cream, if that’s what you’re calling it.” Everything you ever wanted to know, and then some, about the business of expensive, “artisanal” ice cream.
 
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com