Who Killed the Romantic Comedy?

[tempestsarekind]

I should probably have a secondary tag "it's hard out there for a comedy," but oh well. An article from February 2014 that was linked in a recent Slate piece about the dominance of men's and boys' stories in movies

Comments

[chelseagirl]

I quite liked Selfie; I was sorry they pulled the plug so quickly as I thought that they had amazing chemistry. Not sure how they could have kept it going long term -- will they/won't they dragging out for seasons might not have worked, but maybe they could have moved into Odd (and in this case literal) Couple territory after awhile.

Honestly, if it hadn't been for the double motivation of Karen Gillan and John Cho, I probably never would have given it a chance, though, and I suspect much of the potential audience has still never heard of her, at least, though he's been around long enough he deserves a substantial following.

[tempestsarekind]

Yeah, this is where I think the US television model presents difficulties for certain kinds of stories (even without the issue of premature cancellation): I don't think seasons' worth of will they/won't they would have been at all a good idea, but a more flexible model - where some shows run for many seasons but some are allowed to tell contained stories over two or three seasons - would have given the show more options. (I often wish I could see a bit of "what comes after" when I'm watching a romantic comedy; TV could theoretically be good at that, especially if you could plan for an ending instead of coming up with dumb reasons to break the couple up because you have to keep the show on the air for four more seasons!)

I think I would have heard about Selfie via Linda Holmes on the NPR MonkeySee blog - she likes romantic comedies, so she reviewed several of the romcom sitcoms this season - but the Karen Gillan and John Cho factor was definitely the reason I made sure to watch it over the others! So that must have made it hard to