There is a moment at the end of the premiere episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend where the main character, Rebecca (Rachel Bloom), breaks into song (more on that in a minute) and mentions the famous lovers, not of history, but of romantic comedies past.
You know: the Harrys and Sallys, the Bellas and Edwards, the Julia Robertses and Richard Geres. There’s a reference earlier in the episode to 2004 Ben-and-Jerry’s-and-Kleenex favourite The Notebook. But the funny thing about all those romcoms is that they’re movies. These days, there are a whole lot more offerings on television than there are at the cinema.
The modern romantic comedy era started with When Harry Met Sally in 1989, the pair who wondered whether good friends could also be great lovers. It turns out they could, and they could make plenty of box office cash too. Then we had Pretty Woman, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and even 27 Dresses, which unleashed the wrath of star Katherine Heigl. But ever since the heyday of Sweet Home Alabama and Two Weeks Notice, the amount of money romcoms make at the box office has been on a steady decline. Since fewer were raking in the cash, fewer were getting made.
That didn’t mean there wasn’t a dependable audience for them out there – and when the movies failed to deliver, television picked up the slack. Sex and the City, squarely in the middle of the romcom boom, is probably the classic, but there are been plenty of shows recently that are trying to recreate the meet-cute moments and the fate-driven love affairs for a new generation raised on You’ve Got Mail.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which debuts Monday at 8pm on the CW, is the most recent. It’s about a successful lawyer in New York who is having a nervous breakdown when she runs into her old high school boyfriend on the street. It turns out that he is about to leave the city and move to West Covina, California, a pit of a town in the Inland Empire. She decides to follow him there and rekindle the romance (since his Facebook profile lists him as single). Hey, it’s no crazier than anything Meg Ryan did in Sleepless in Seattle.
Of course, there are complications to their love, according to romcom convention. All the standard characters are there, including the guy she’s supposed to be in love with but doesn’t see it yet, the wacky best friend and the crazy clueless boss. Oh, and remember that part about breaking into song? Rebecca’s inner life isn’t displayed by a voiceover but rather by comical musical numbers that no one else can see. Well, you gotta have a gimmick.
That’s true of all the recent TV romcoms we’ve seen. NBC’s A to Z and ABC’s Manhattan Love Story – both of which were canceled, though the latter moved to Hulu – featured lessons about love based on the alphabet and a male-and-female inner monologue respectively. You’re the Worst on FX is about a couple that hates relationships falling in love. Catastrophe, a hit in the UK that airs in the US on Amazon, is about a couple that gets pregnant before they even start dating. The Mindy Project, currently airing its fourth season, on Hulu, is trying to see what happily ever after looks like for a couple who got together far faster than they should have, at least on a TV sitcom.
All of these shows (and some more insightful cinematic romcoms like this summer’s Trainwreck) look at the ways growing up with these Hollywood movies has affected women. It charts how it’s shifted their expectations of what romance would be like and what constitutes falling in love. They examine the cultural norms of romance and whether or not they apply in a world of growing gender equality where swiping right or left has replaced meeting a man at the top of the Empire State Building. The Mindy Project was the first show to notice that offering up a new romantic comedy also meant that it had to take stock of all the romantic comedies of the past. That every time people fall in love onscreen, it has to be at least a little bit meta.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend might look like a lot of movies from the past, with its lead obsessed with getting her old boyfriend back (hello, My Best Friend’s Wedding) and especially the Busby Berkeley musical antics, but it is the future of this genre. It’s wild, it’s ambitious, it’s full of powerful women not only defined by who they love but how far they’re willing to go for it. And, of course, there’s music. The gimmicks, they never hurt.
