Death, Let Me Do My Special

Rachel Bloom wants to perform a silly, escapist musical comedy set about a neighborhood tree that smells like semen, but a literal personification of Death keeps calling her out from the audience. What starts as a desperate attempt to ignore the pandemic and pretend it is still 2019 quickly pivots into a scripted confrontation with the grief she spent years running from.

Filmed at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, a location chosen because it was a creative home of her late writing partner Adam Schlesinger, the 2024 Netflix special marks Bloom’s return to the spotlight after the end of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Directed by Seth Barrish, the show mimics a traditional stand-up taping before transitioning into a theatrical dialogue. Bloom’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-star David Hull appears as Death, a polite but persistent heckler who forces her to rewrite the evening’s material on the fly.

The hour oscillates between musical-theater numbers and narrative storytelling. Bloom details the terrifying, isolated experience of her daughter’s birth and immediate NICU stay during the initial 2020 lockdowns, alongside a song mourning the inevitable death of her dog and a sequence mocking the manipulative emotional cues of Broadway musicals. The emotional core of the performance is her attempt to process Schlesinger’s death from COVID-19 complications. Critics praised the production’s willingness to sit with grief rather than just joke around it, noting that it successfully balances theatrical structure with the casual energy of a live gig.