How Streaming Saved the Romantic Comedy
Today’s on-demand rom-coms are cheap, low-stakes, and more inclusive than ever
People take for granted that I am, and always have been, a die-hard fan of the romantic comedy. It’s a fair assumption, considering I’ve written a romantic-comedy novel. But the truth is, if I were starring in a rom-com about my relationship with the genre it might be called: It’s Complicated.
As a kid and adolescent, I loved romantic comedies, the 1990s Nora Ephron trifecta of When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail in particular. By the time I went off to college, filled my course load with classes on gender, race, and class, shaved my head, and started dating girls, the rom-com had become unwatchable to me. I was no longer willing to project myself onto characters with whom I had nothing in common. I couldn’t unsee the fact that not a single romantic comedy had been written with someone like me in mind.
Around this same time, epic representation fails aside, the rom-com objectively started to suck. Remember 2003’s Gigli? Or that same year’s the Sweetest Thing? How about 2008’s Over Her Dead Body or 2009’s All About Steve? It’s been well-documented that in the early 2000s, the once robust genre began to decline and studios soon made fewer of them. In 2010 and 2011, nine…
