Rachel Bloom: Death, Let Me Do My Special Review 2024 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Rachel Bloom doesn’t want to talk about death in her new comedy special. In fact, that’s the joke of the title, Death, Let Me Do My Special — a joke which becomes quite literal early on, pushing the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-creator to tackle one of life’s biggest complications. The result showcases her signature blend of the profane and profound for a cathartic one-woman/one-anthropomorphic-celestial-concept stage show, now streaming on Netflix.
Death, Let Me Do My Special begins with Bloom acknowledging the presence of a young boy in the audience before launching into her first song, which focuses on a particular type of tree that happens to smell (to quote some of the lyrics) “reminiscent of a dick sneeze.” Then, however, things take an abrupt turn, as Bloom is forced to confront the topic central to the show — despite wanting to avoid it with all her heart.
While death as a concept is a very active presence in the show, it’s something Bloom does her best to face in the context of her relationships with some of the most important entities in her life: her baby, her dog, and her writing partner and close friend Adam Schlesinger. In case the name isn’t familiar, Schlesinger not only co-founded the band Fountains of Wayne, but collaborated extensively with Bloom on the music for The CW’s acclaimed Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Tragically, he was an early casualty of COVID, dying April 1st, 2020 — just after Bloom gave birth to her daughter.
It’s that conflation of life and death which proves key to the show’s existence, anchored by six songs that live up to Bloom’s reputation for silly, earworm-y, and heart-stirring tunes. Taped at Williamstown Theater Festival at Williams College in Massachusetts (where Schlesinger attended college, Bloom makes a point of noting), the special itself features clean camerawork and stage design that sets itself up as simple, but delivers a few fun surprises. And Bloom’s singing voice as good as it’s ever been, bringing just the right notes of sweetness, humor, and pathos to each track.
A key aspect of Death, Let Me Do My Special is that the world has been through a lot over the last four years — and a lot of us haven’t really processed it. We’ve lost loved ones, we’ve witnessed untold numbers of global atrocities, we’ve been confronted daily by viciousness and spite that only seems to feed the grief and despair and hopelessness that leads us towards… well, deflection. Singing funny little songs. Or laughing at them.
Bloom doesn’t judge us for that; she’s right there with us. But she’s also not afraid to spill open the anxieties she’s been bottling up for the last several years, the kinds of fear we all have about what might happen to our pets or ourselves thanks to the rude realities of biology and time. And by doing so, she makes us feel less alone.
Since 2020, there have been a lot of projects made in an attempt to capture the effects of the pandemic on society. Many of those projects have floundered in their efforts, since it’s understandably a challenge to understand what happened to the world without the perspective granted by time and distance; even things like Bo Burnham’s Inside feel like raw confessionals as opposed to more considered, in-depth responses.
Death, Let Me Do My Special, though, feels like it belongs to the next phase of creative works determined to make sense of these compounded waves of grief. (Bloom doesn’t overtly acknowledge major world events since the pandemic, but does make reference to things not exactly getting better on a few fronts, since lockdown ended.) While it doesn’t pretend to have any real answers for the big questions, it does offer up a path for coming to terms with these huge and impossible issues, if only through Bloom’s empathetic acknowledgement that they’re huge and impossible issues for us all.
There’s a meta thread running throughout the special, a self-awareness that adds just the right amount of spikiness to its more sentimental moments. And that all comes together in the end, with a conclusion that’s as funny and emotional and sincere as everything that’s come before, featuring one of the most perfectly delivered “Fuck you”s I’ve ever seen on screen. There are no answers, but asking the questions is important, Bloom tells us. Whether or not we do it in song.
