I can’t say enough good things about Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. As the only hour-long musical comedy on network television, it’s breaking all kinds of new ground. Perhaps most notably, it’s been celebrated for the way it handles mental health and for subtly changing the way we see Asian American men on TV. Vincent Rodriguez III plays Josh Chan, the hunky-albeit-naive love interest of Bloom’s delusional protagonist, Rebecca.
“I think Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is definitely one of the game-changers in that way,” Rodriguez tells me over Skype. “The fact that I’m Filipino, they embraced that.”
Josh was initially sketched out vaguely as “Asian bro,” but once Rodriguez was cast, his Filipino American identity served as the inspiration for Josh’s ethnicity.