It's official: we're in a new age of the rom-com
A couple are having a serious conversation about reality television. “Listen, there is a lot of lore you need to understand when watching Vanderpump [Rules], and you need to know we do this on Sundays specifically because this is our football,” she says. His response? “It’s like a church.” Yeah, her eyes soften, it’s like a church. This scene, in the new critically acclaimed Netflix rom-com series Nobody Wants This, is just one of many smile-inducing moments that capture the realness and romance of two people who – while not void of questioning – resolutely show up as themselves. In all their vulnerable, unapologetically oversharing, anxious, ambitious, emotionally available, glory.
It is a very funny and very modern courtship, and one so rarely told on screen: a rabbi, Noah [Adam Brody] and a non-Jewish sex and relationships podcaster, Joanne [Kristen Bell], falling for each other. There are countless aspects that one can relate to. The first great kiss. Getting 'the ick'. That text message you send that sounds hilarious at the time, deranged when you’ve had no reply three hours later. The internal panic of meeting the parents. LinkedIn-stalking The Ex. Highlighting that a good date night in is hinged upon optimum snacks.
Erin Foster – the creator of the series, who was inspired by her own love story with her husband Simon Tikhman – tells me that she didn’t initially set out to make a romantic comedy. “I always felt like the kind of writer who didn’t know how to follow traditional formulas,” she says from her office in LA. “Now I’m seeing that worked in my favour... I didn’t want to create manufactured problems that I couldn’t see happening in a real relationship. I think real relationship challenges are so interesting.”
Undoubtedly, if rom-com were a language, I would be fluent in it. Nora Ephron is the closest thing I have to a God. It has long frustrated me that this genre has historically been dismissed as frothy fun, a lesser craft compared to a hard-hitting drama – a guilty pleasure. The truth is, creating characters that you root for, who you relate to, who make you simultaneously laugh and swoon, is an art.
“The best romantic comedies are the ones where the comedy is unique to the characters and their actual personalities,” says Starstruck and Nobody Wants This director Karen Maine. “It’s part of why they connect. The humour is not just some silly set piece to make the movie feel entertaining or big.” There are too many good examples to namecheck, but I defy anyone not to delight in When Harry Met Sally’s rhythmic dialogue (wordplay is the foreplay, the almost-kiss); Julia Roberts’ shop scene revenge in Pretty Woman (“Big mistake. Huge!”); or Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey’s charmingly chaotic ‘You’re So Vain’ duet in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.
Which is not to suggest these films are faultless. Diversity in storytelling and casting isn’t exactly romantic comedy’s strong suit. Familiarity and hackneyed formulas are part of the genre’s appeal, yes, but too much of it can lead to stagnancy at best, the alienation of entire audiences at worst. But it feels like a positive shift is emerging: a new age of the rom-com. Nobody Wants This neighboured with Gen Z’s ‘Notting Hill’ in the form of Rye Lane; Ambika Mod playing Emma in the exquisite reimagining of One Day, a turning point for South Asian representation; refreshing takes on age-gap relationships in The Idea of You and A Family Affair (also a case for 40+ womanhood as your hottest, most creatively fulfilling years). It’s also remarkable to think that, just two years ago, Billy Eichner’s film Bros was the first time an openly gay man had co-written and starred in a major studio film.
“We are seeing more stories by more diverse people come into play,” agrees Ilana Kaplan, the culture editor and author of the forthcoming book Nora Ephron at the Movies. “I think what really prompted the conversation to shift was 2018's Crazy Rich Asians and the success of that movie. This moves the needle in terms of what kinds of stories will do well at the box office and the people whose stories need to be represented.”
On reflection, I see how much a wider scope of relationship representation was needed, too; a romance more grounded in reality, less so in fairy-tales. The feminist author and rom-com fan Roxane Gay once said, “It’s not that I believe love actually happens the way Hollywood pretends it does. I do, however, enjoy a good lie.” I've been guilty of taking that fantasy element far too literally in the past — equating huge public displays of affection, the gift of being chosen, the will-they-won’t they anxiety, as the absolute apex of romance.
The more I speak to Foster, the more it feels as though Nobody Wants This is her opportunity to offer a new template for attraction. To rewrite the rulebook, so to speak. Aside from the enjoyment of living vicariously through two people connecting through shared humour, genuine respect and erotically charged eye contact (do not underestimate), the show is peppered with profundity and genuinely heart-warming moments. “Every woman I know has been in a shitty relationship with someone that made them feel bad about who they are – and we have it in our minds that the goal is to make them want us,” she explains. “I did that all throughout my 20s and I lost a decade of my life trying to be whatever that person wanted me to be. I don’t want to continue to perpetuate that wiring for women. I wanted to romanticise a healthy relationship.”
Be it past or present-day romantic comedy, there is still one uniting pleasure we take from them: the sheer joy of seeing other people fall in love. Feeling high on the hopefulness of it all. Love, in the fullest sense of that word, can be transformative. It can build you up. It’s, as the American civil rights activist James Baldwin wrote, the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. For a moment at least, these stories on screen allow us to bathe in that light just a little longer. Only now do they recognise the power of realism over fiction.
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