Crazy Ex-Girlfriend returned on Friday with a question: Where’s Rebecca Bunch? The show’s protagonist (Rachel Bloom) has disappeared after being jilted at the altar by her longtime obsession, Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III), at the end of Season 2. In the season finale, Rebecca had sworn revenge on Josh for abandoning her in favor of becoming a priest, but when we rejoin West Covina two weeks after the wedding, Rebecca is nowhere to be found, and the whole town is buzzing about her possible whereabouts.
Cue our first song of the season! The whole cast joins in for “Where’s Rebecca Bunch?” which converts West Covina into a provincial town straight out of Beauty and the Beast. While it’s fun to see our 21st-century characters decked out in mob caps and tricorn hats, the song is otherwise all over the place, as halfway through, it answers its own question: Rebecca is holed up in a hotel room, hiding from the piteous stares and faux-British accents of the others.
“Where’s Rebecca Bunch?” might have been more effective as the season opener if the show had dragged out the mystery out so that Rebecca was absent from the first episode entirely, BoJack Horseman–style. Instead, Rebecca’s reappearance within the first two minutes feels anticlimactic, especially as she immediately comes out of her breakup funk and arrives at the conclusion that she should embrace her “woman scorned” status and exact revenge—precisely the same conclusion she’d already reached at the end of Season 2.
The premiere episode’s other song, “Let’s Generalize About Men,” is far superior, as Rebecca and her squad, made up of Paula (Donna Lynne Champlin), Heather (Vella Lovell), and Valencia (Gabrielle Ruiz), launch into a Pointer Sisters-inspired, ’80s-style anthem about how terrible men are. But before you reach for your keyboard for a #NotAllMen Twitter rant, you should probably listen to the song, which contains deeply ironic lyrics like “All men are stupid and childish/ Even the ones who are smart and mature” and “There are no exceptions/ All three billion men are like this (All 3.6 billion men).”
The song isn’t actually about how men are monsters, murders, and rapists, which is made clear by the way the women pivot to generalizing about how every single gay man in the world is great, and by Paula’s sudden realization that she has sons who are—gasp!—men-to-be. (Donna Lynne Champlin’s half-hearted power pose at the end of the song is a reminder that she’s consistently one of the best things about this show.) Instead, as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-creator Aline Brosh McKenna has explained, “Let’s Generalize About Men” is about “the assumptions that people make about each other, and the way that people make these kinds of sweeping general statements and how enjoyable that is.”
Or in other words: “This is some primal kind of ritual we need now and then.” Giant hairspray bottle full of glitter? Optional.
