How Rachel Bloom Battled — And Made Peace With — Death

For the record, if there is a cosmic one, Rachel Bloom would like audiences to know that she'd much rather be making raunchy jokes about foliage that smells like bodily fluids. Instead, in her new Netflix comedy special Death, Let Me Do My Special, Bloom tackles the Covid-19 pandemic, giving birth, the death of her longtime collaborator Adam Schlesinger , and the Grim Reaper himself, head-on. When we meet at a buzzing espresso bar in New York City in October, it's a bleary Wednesday morning, and Bloom, who makes L.A. her home, is in the middle of a whirlwind 48-hour press tour.

"My body is a little confused," she confesses. "But it's OK!"

This chirpy way of pushing through is signature Bloom. The comedian got her start on YouTube with a viral, NSFW "Baby One More Time"-inspired song dedicated to the legendary science fiction writer Ray Bradbury . But she's best known for her cult-classic musical comedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend . The series, which ran for four seasons on The CW from 2015 to 2019, centered on Rebecca Bunch, a high-powered Manhattan attorney who suffers a manic episode and follows an old flame to West Covina, California. A raunchy, bop-filled tour de force, it managed to make sing-along moments out of storylines involving mental breakdowns, suicidal ideation, and depression. Now, with Death, Let Me Do My Special, adapted from Bloom's 2023 one-woman Off-Broadway show, she's applying her unflinching humor to 2020, the year that became both the best and worst time of her life.

The special begins with a new song from Bloom called "Darling Meet Me Under the Cum Tree," a sweet tale of meeting a lover underneath a Bradford pear, a tree that just happens to smell like, well, yeah. But shortly into the characteristically raunchy tune, Bloom is confronted by a heckler in the audience. It's Death — and he's there to make her talk about what she's been avoiding: him.

During 2020, Bloom had been preparing for a few big life changes. She was pregnant with her first child and planning a new special. But right after Bloom gave birth, her daughter had to be moved into the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), an experience made even more harrowing as the hospital began to be overrun with Covid-19 patients and Bloom was forced to leave the newborn behind to make room for them. The day, two months later, that Bloom was finally able to take her daughter home, the comedian learned that Schelsinger, the Fountains of Wayne frontman who was one of her best friends, as well as her writing partner and co-composer since 2019, had died from Covid complications. Editor's picks

"This show gets into heavy material and is very personal," Bloom, 37, tells Rolling Stone. "I mindfully didn't want the show to feel exploitative of my daughter being in the NICU, or my friend passing away. Sometimes, the answer lies in the tension. Some really horrible things happened, and you've got to lean into the weirdness of it. And when you go through grief, it feels like you're trying to do a show, and then death is the ultimate heckler who fucks up your shit."

You've been working on the material for this special since 2021. How do you feel about audiences all over finally being able to see it? I'm really excited. I'm just really proud of it. It was a whole road getting this even on a streamer. There's also a fundamental weirdness when something personal also becomes something you do publicity for.

As a comedian, you're able to navigate very difficult topics with slapstick humor. "You Stupid Bitch," one of your most popular songs from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, turns self-loathing into a ballad, with profound lyrics like "you ruined everything, you stupid bitch." That's the height of comedy. That makes me really happy, because writing those lyrics was scary. I was like, "This is how I feel, but I don't know if this is gonna make sense to anyone else." And the fact that it's made sense to so many other people is really validating. Related

I bring it up because there's obviously a long journey from "My friend has just died" to being able to get onstage and actualize what you're feeling about that in front of an audience. What was that process like? The pandemic had a lot to do with the timing. Adam died April 1, 2020, and I didn't even go onstage until May 2021. There was a lot of time to process it. It didn't feel like I was picking at a scab. And that's why it took so long to get this special up. And I had a newborn, which is its own mind-fuck. If I had tried to get up and talk about Adam's death in front of an audience in June, July, August [of 2020], I don't think I would have been able to do that. I would have just started crying.

Has becoming a parent changed your perspective on how you develop material? Oh, it's horrible. Love makes you lame. I used to do a whole bit in the [one-woman] show about dead baby jokes. As a teenager, everyone loves dead baby jokes, because as a teenager, you're pushing the envelope, and you have nothing to lose. You can be ironic about the darkest shit, because [you think], "Nothing bad will ever happen to me." Now that I'm a parent, my tolerance for anything about children being hurt — honestly, violence in general — has gone down 88 percent. There's just a part of my heart that has been split open and the stakes now are so high.

Do you think it's changed your comedy? Well, obviously I can talk about being a parent now. Though so much material has already been done around having a kid. The comedy challenge now is, "What can I joke about that won't fuck her over in 10, 15 years?" I don't want to embarrass her. She can't legally or, like, morally give consent. So that's been a real debate for both me and my husband [comedian Dan Gregor]: what is the material that makes it more about my experience with parenting as opposed to giving up information about her. It's an imprecise science.

So you're worried about her digital footprint? Because I quote-unquote willingly got on the internet as an adult. But the internet is not what it was when I started doing music videos in 2010. It has become a much more intense, porous, forever, and dangerous place. I don't think any of us gave full consent to what the internet has now become, right? So thinking about what the internet is going to be in 10 or 20 years, we're anticipating that a little bit. If she's gonna be online and be on social media, I want that to be her decision. There's so many other ways I'm sure we'll fuck her up, and I don't want the fact that my husband and I are willingly in show business to be the main thing. Like, "I just want to get a job at the FBI, and I can't because you talked about me shitting myself."

You and Adam were longtime collaborators. What notes do you think he would have on this new show? I thought about that a lot. I really tried to write the show anticipating his notes, which is why it fundamentally goes back to a comedic place. Adam was such an unsentimental person, more unsentimental than I am. I didn't want him to be, wherever he might be, watching a show he hated. The thing he would have hated the most is me playing a montage of Adam's pictures with "In the arms of the angel..." [from the Sarah McLachlan song "Angel"]. So how do you make a tribute to someone in a real but unsentimental way? That definitely was a guiding force on this show.

How would you describe your special's version of Rachel? Rachel has been processing this for years. "Show Rachel" is kind of still stuck where I was in 2020, which is vacillating between [Adam's death] devastating me and then just not wanting to think about it. Because that's where I was at with grief, and that's the central question of the show. Part of the reason I started working on the show as soon as I could was I had that question: I have to have this not paralyze me. And doing the show helped me kind of solve that question. How do I do that? How do you acknowledge death but continue to live?

Where do you think the special fits in terms of your career? Show business is hard because it's image-based. So right now I'm working on two movies and three TV shows. In the past couple of years, I had two other shows get passed on. So from my perspective, I have been fucking working my ass off, and I have a whole artistic journey that no one's gotten to see. Because outside of live performance and TikTok and YouTube, you are at the mercy of people who want to give you money to make a thing. There's a ton of stuff I'm working on. My hope is that this special will then give people incentive to actually order it, to give me a chance.

That's fascinating, considering Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was a critical darling. But it struggled with viewership its entire run. I think we were the lowest-rated show to ever get four seasons on The CW.

Is that dissonance difficult? Especially for projects that you're extremely proud of? My therapist has a term for it: status dysmorphia. On one hand, you're like, "This show's a big deal." Our live shows are selling out. I have a Golden Globe. Have an Emmy. The movie offers should just be coming in. Oh, they're not? But when I listen to [old songs], I'm like, "I can't believe The CW let us do this." I can't believe a network that had Riverdale and superhero shows let us do a song called "Man Nap," just about men taking a nap. It's so silly. Trending

I'm already thinking of my next show after this. I want to go on tour with a brand new song-stand-up show. I want to do more music videos on YouTube and TikTok. I would love to get some money to make those music videos, but if nothing else, I'll just fucking do it myself. It all goes back to making your own shit