Rachel Bloom Has a Funny Song About Death

At the start of 2020, the comedian, actress, and writer Rachel Bloom was riding high. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” the musical TV show that she had co-created and starred in, had wrapped up its four-season run the previous year. Her book of memoiristic essays, “I Want To Be Where the Normal People Are,” was scheduled to be published in the fall. She was at work on a new musical with her collaborator Adam Schlesinger, and was simultaneously developing a comedy special that interspersed standup bits with her signature bawdy original songs. And she and her husband were expecting their first child, a girl.

Then, in March, everything came apart. The COVID pandemic, which had seemed so remote a few weeks before, suddenly hit. Bloom gave birth to her daughter, but the baby had lung problems and had to be confined to the NICU. Later that night, she learned that Schlesinger, who lived in New York, had been hospitalized with the coronavirus. The news was a shock. Nearly a week later, as she was bringing her daughter home, Bloom was told that Schlesinger had died.

That uncanny synchronicity, the jolting coincidence of birth and death, changed Bloom’s life, and the trajectory of her work. She began to develop a new piece, “Death, Let Me Do My Show,” which she toured around the country, and which will arrive on Netflix this week, as “Death, Let Me Do My Special.” The show, which I first saw last fall, during its Off Broadway run in New York, begins with a burst of joyful abandon, as if Bloom is willing her audience to return with her to the comparatively carefree days of 2019. Dressed in a sparkly sequinned jacket and heels, she bounds onto the stage to her favorite pump-up track, “Space Jam,” and proceeds to sing a nineteen-twenties-style ditty about a romance unfolding beneath an odorous Bradford pear, better known to the smelling public as the “cum tree.” It’s funny, silly, and raunchy, a classic Rachel Bloom joint—until, suddenly, a voice from the audience interrupts her. A heckler? Yes, but not just any heckler; the interloper turns out to be Death himself. Death (played, in the Netflix special, by David Hull) wants Bloom to stop ignoring him. Hasn’t he been kind of a big part of her life over the past few years?

The show that ensues has moments that are as funny as anything Bloom has done. She got her start making parody music videos—her first, “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury,” was a viral pop-punk paean to the nonagenarian writer—and musical comedy forms the backbone of “Death.” There is a fantastically zany song about the Rainbow Bridge—a kind of mythical gateway to heaven for pets and their owners—which turns unexpectedly profound on its reprise late in the show, and a delightfully counterintuitive number about ghosts and the afterlife. But the show is frank about the tough stuff: the overwhelming anxiety that engulfed Bloom when her daughter was born, her sense of despair at the loss of her friend. It deals with love, sorrow, and survival. Bloom and I recently spoke on Zoom; she was sitting in her home office, in Los Angeles, in front of a whiteboard full of notes and a framed medical diagram of a breast. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

I was trying to get screeners of the special for a while, and your very sweet publicists were, like, “This week!” for a number of weeks.

We shot it in July, and then edited it now. We just got the final version last week. There are some choices we’ve made in the Netflix edit that differ from the show.

What are some of the changes that were made?

The big one is that all of the things that I said at the top of the show, where I’m, like, “I was working on a show in 2019”—that’s all cut. And so I replaced that with the voice mail. [The show opens with a recording of Bloom leaving a voice mail, in 2020, saying that she’s going to postpone the filming of her special.] That gives you all of the exposition you need. I actually love it, and it’s something that you could not do onstage because it would break the illusion of the stage. But for the Netflix special, it really works.

The voice mail is dated March 13, 2020. You’re talking about how you want to put the special on hold, because it seems like the world’s going a bit crazy. What was that voice mail? Who were you talking to?

So that’s fake.

Oh, fuck.

No, I mean, look. I want people to believe it’s real, because that is what was happening around that time. And that is a text that I was sending around that time—

Well, let me ask it differently. You were working on a special in 2020. What was the state of it then?

In March, 2020, I’d already been doing some of the bits and some of the new songs at shows. So I was very much in process. And I was going to have the baby.

You were how many months pregnant?

In March, I was nine months pregnant. The plan was, I’d go on a slight maternity leave, and then I would really ramp up into prepping for this special. At the time, I had offers from a few places, because I’d just come off the TV show—and this is a time when many people were getting specials, which is not the case now, by the way. The specials market has kind of collapsed. So I had about half of it planned out.

Then what happened?

I give birth; the world explodes. At a certain point, my daughter’s playroom was my office, which is just a very on-the-nose metaphor. It was still my office, but it was slowly being overtaken by baby stuff. On the back of the door was my whiteboard, where I had my whole special outlined. I was playing with her at, like, 5 A.M., you know, exhausted. My friend had just died, and I’m looking at this silly whiteboard and thinking, This is so stupid. This is irrelevant. And then I was, like, Well, what if you did a show where you acknowledged that, and then Death came in and interrupted?

This gets to the core of what the show is about. Tell me a little bit about the friend, Adam Schlesinger.

He was my writing partner, one of the three songwriters on “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” I had just seen him in L.A. at a place called Burgers Never Say Die—which is a fantastic burger place—and then he went back to New York, which had started to lock down. Meanwhile, you know, the N.B.A. shuts down, Tom Hanks gets COVID. Stuff is starting to look scary. I go to my doctor and she’s, like, “I think I want to get you in the hospital sooner rather than later.” So I decide to get induced when I’m basically at thirty-nine weeks.

We get to the hospital. I’d just been texting with Adam and Jack [Dolgen], my other writing partner, about my pregnancy, because Jack and Adam wrote a song for “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” called “The Miracle of Birth,” and Adam had two daughters, so he’d seen the process. A couple of days before I gave birth, I texted, “My mucus plug fell out,” and Adam said, “That’s mucus to our ears!”