Many of us swooned as Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams finally locked lips in The Notebook and laughed until we cried at the orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally. Yet in recent years the romantic comedy has fallen from grace, victim of too many stale scenarios, a glut of will-they-won’t-they-of-course-they-will plotlines that left audiences more nauseous than overjoyed. That’s all starting to change, however, with the genre enjoying a welcome revival thanks to a slew of films, TV shows and novels that, crucially, play with established tropes, give voice to new kinds of stories and look set to remind millions why they first fell in love with the romcom.
“What we’re seeing is a real shift towards funny, smart, sexy, even edgy romcoms,” says author Sarra Manning, whose newest novel, The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp, gives fresh voice to literature’s most notorious anti-heroine. “There’s an argument that audiences stopped watching them but that’s because studios were churning out bilge like Bride Wars. Two women hating on each other for the most shallow of reasons is hardly feelgood.”
Rachel Winters, whose debut romcom Would Like To Meet was recently snapped up by Trapeze books, agrees. “There is definitely a whole fresh group of films and books inspired by the great golden age of romcoms, but which also move on from them,” she says. “There are more diverse films coming through, and ones that play more with our expectations, but they’re still recognisably romcoms in that they celebrate life and love and make us laugh and, yes, occasionally cry.”
It’s a revival that’s been largely driven by streaming site Netflix, which is not only home to classics of the genre such as When Harry Met Sally and Notting Hill but also new-generation hits including the charming Set It Up and glorious To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, which made an internet heartthrob of leading man Noah Centineo. Meanwhile, TV has experimented with the genre: shows such as Jane the Virgin, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Lovesick have fun sending up notions of “the one” while convincing audiences to root for various star-crossed couples.
In books, too, there has been a renaissance. Former Tatler journalist Sophia Money-Coutts’s The Plus One was one of the biggest sellers of the summer, and buzz is building for fresh takes such as Beth O’Leary’s The Flatshare and Kate Davies’s In at the Deep End. Ahead of next week’s Frankfurt Book Fair, the talk was not of psychological thrillers and domestic noir but comedy and romance. “There’s definitely a sense that the romcom is having a revival – we’ve had an increase in strong submissions that draw on romantic comedies and feel real and engaging and uplifting,” says Jess Whitlum-Cooper, commissioning editor at Headline Publishing, who recently signed Love, Unscripted by debut author Owen Nicholls, which she describes as “a heartfelt, warm, funny, sometimes dark story of two people who fall in love on the eve of Barack Obama’s election”.
Literary agent Cathryn Summerhayes, who has a romcom by Bollywood star and activist Twinkle Khanna on submission, agrees. “I think there was a time when the genre was too simplistic and you’d have endless books with cupcakes on the covers, but what we’re seeing now is books that acknowledge that we’re dating in a different way and at different ages,” she says. “One of the things I really liked about Twinkle’s book is that it’s about a woman who has to come to terms with the fact that she’s in her 40s, her marriage has ended, she’s unlikely to have children – so what happens next?”
So what is driving this revived interest? South African author Jo Watson, writer of the Destination Love series, the last of which is out next month, identifies a desire to take a break from the troubles of today’s world. “Anyone who spends any time on their Facebook feed these days feels overwhelmed by the negativity,” she says. “It’s not about turning a blind eye to terrible situations, more about regaining a bit of sanity. Romcoms offer a space to relax, feel happy and root for the characters’ lives.”
Justin Myers, whose debut novel The Last Romeo was published this summer, agrees. “We live in extreme and stressful times [in which] much doesn’t make sense, or feels out of control,” he says. “What better way to remove yourself from it than by focusing on relatable, human stories that either speak to your experience or inspire you? A story of two – or more – people falling in love, fucking it up, then getting back on track draws you in immediately.”
Myers wrote The Last Romeo to create “something faithful to the concept of romantic comedy but also relatable to how we live and think now, with a gay man at its centre who wasn’t questioning his sexuality, miserable or dying”. He believes that one of the best things about the revived interest in romcoms is the way that the type of stories being told is beginning to change.
Thus, recent US box-office hit Crazy Rich Asians struck a chord because it placed Asian-American experiences centre stage; To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before has been praised for its diverse cast and willingness to upend masculine stereotypes, and the recent Love, Simon was a warm-hearted romcom about a gay teen that both subverted and celebrated traditional teen movie cliches.
“People have underestimated romance for so long,” says US author Jasmine Guillory, whose new book The Proposal is out next month. “I’ve read so many romcoms that have tackled major issues like race, sexism, mental illness but that still charm me with the love story at the heart. These are stories for and by women, and society as a whole tends to look down on them because of that.”
It’s arguable, too, that those who wrote off the romcom did so out of a lazy shorthand rather than any real knowledge. “I grind my teeth whenever anyone throws the ‘predictable’ insult – consider for a moment how predictable a James Bond film is. There’s no way he won’t defeat the villain and get the girl and live to fight another day,” says Mhairi McFarlane, whose fifth romcom, Don’t You Forget About Me, is out in March. “To think romcoms have to be fluffy, twee and cute is underselling a very sophisticated audience who would follow you to all sorts of places.”
My favourite romcom… by Mark Kermode
When Kim Newman and I were working on the BBC4 series Secrets of Cinema, the episode on romcoms was both the easiest and the most difficult episode to write: easy because there were so many great examples (from Hollywood to Bollywood, silents to musicals, Preston Sturges to Nora Ephron); difficult because it was impossible to decide what to leave out. The situation was complicated by the fact that, for all its familiar tropes, the romcom proved infinitely malleable.
We found elements of the genre in everything from David Cronenberg’s horror remake The Fly to Miike Takashi’s Japanese shocker Audition. For proof of this infinite flexibility, look no further than Paul Thomas Anderson’s unhinged 2002 masterpiece Punch-Drunk Love. On the one hand, it’s an Adam Sandler comedy about a dorky guy called Barry who falls in love with Emily Watson’s Lena and goes through the usual boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back-again shenanigans. Yet it is also: an intense study of anxiety and sociopathy, in which Sandler’s character is filled with violent rage, while Watson’s character is essentially a stalker; a reworking of the Superman myth in which red-clad Lena becomes blue-suited Barry’s cape, enabling him to fly; a version of Popeye, in which the sound of Shelley Duvall’s Olive Oyl singing He Needs Me is a touchstone tune; a blackmail/extortion thriller which mutates into a vengeful tale involving a phone-sex worker and a corrupt mattress salesman; ; and an adaptation of a true story about a civil engineer who discovered a loophole in a Healthy Choice chocolate puddings offer and wound up with 1.25 million air miles of free travel.
It is also one of the most beautifully baffling movies of the 21st century. and (for my money) the very best film of Paul Thomas Anderson’s extraordinary careerShot on 35mm, and Best enjoyed when projected on a big screen, Punch-Drunk Love makes me laugh, cry, gasp and swoon, over and over again. It’s one of my desert island movies. Worth it for the moment in which Lena lovingly tells Barry: “I want to scoop out your eyes and I want to eat them” – one of the best romantic lines of all times.
