happy early valentine’s day!

I mentioned this project when I was on Mark Pollard’s Sweathead podcast back in October 2024, and I fully intended to publish it last Valentine’s Day, but at the last minute I decided to hold it to do some restructuring. Ultimately, I just didn’t like it as much as my other projects, which was disappointing because I’m normally very proud of them! And it wasn’t a project that was going to be outdated any time soon. But it did give me time to watch Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025), which was excellent.

So now, here it is, in all of its glory—What’s Love Got to Do With It?: The Rise, Recession, and Renaissance of Romantic Comedies. Honestly part of the reason it took so long was that, compared to the topics of some of my other projects—post-apocalypticism, bimboism, existentialism and moral philosophy—you’d think rom-coms would be a piece of cake, but as it turns out, there’s a reason no one has offered an easy answer to the question: “Why don’t they make rom-coms like they used to?” I went down an absurd number of rabbit holes to answer this question, and this is the first deck I’ve made that necessitated an entire separate overflow deck of scrapped slides I couldn’t bear to delete fully but didn’t actually have a place in the narrative (RIP 💀). It’s a complex question! But I tried my best to break it down in what I hope is an interesting way. The entire film industry has suffered under capitalism’s intense pressures (look no further than the deluge of reboots, spinoffs, sequels, etc.), but rom-coms have fallen victim to a unique vicious cycle of risk and reward. It’s a billion-dollar equation no one has successfully solved, which I think means a wealth of opportunity if studios are willing to take a chance.

I love a rom-com. I have to be in a particular mood to watch all other genres, but I will never say no to a rom-com. Rom-coms are inherently hopeful, a balm for the soul in unprecedented times (desperately needed at this moment for...reasons). But my personal preferences aside, I also think rom-coms are genuinely really interesting, because much like love, they are inexplicably charming (plenty of people love “bad” rom-coms), and much like horror movies, they’re statements about the cultural mood. Horror and disaster movies are manifestations of our fears, but rom-coms reflect our aspirations—not just ideal romantic relationships, but an ideal world.

In college, I took a class called “The Comic Turn of Mind,” in which we studied everything from Aristophanes to Larry David to Shakespeare to Freud (my final was titled “Real Men Wear Heels: The Deconstruction of the Gender Binary and Sexual Politics in Some Like It Hot,” and it remains one of my favorite essays I wrote in college), so I knew I was going to start with the foundations of comedy, but I underestimated just how many cultural forces have shaped the rom-com genre. I set out to answer a couple of key questions: Is the rom-com really dead? Is it ever coming back? Were rom-coms really better back then? And how do rom-coms reflect evolving standards for love and romance?

I was lucky enough to speak to Dr. Melissa M. Moore, a researcher who wrote her dissertation on a corpus of 188 rom-com scripts analyzed using a LLM (she has kindly given me permission to share all of her research on this topic, linked throughout the deck!), and Scott Meslow, the author of From Hollywood with Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy, which is cited in apparently every article ever written about romantic comedies. Their work was instrumental in developing a cultural perspective of this deck, because I’ve found articles bemoaning “the death of the rom-com” and heralding “the revival of the rom-com” equally annoying and also disingenuous in that they usually haven’t done more than five minutes of research before making that kind of declaration; they’re just personal grievances. It gives back in my day energy. And while I admit the rom-coms of the ‘90s had a particular je ne sais quoi when it comes to vibes, I think many of them are vastly overrated (I was actually furious after finishing Sleepless in Seattle because I couldn’t believe it was—and still is!—the gold standard for rom-coms; I thought it was awful) and practically a guidebook for how not to approach romantic relationships (the exception is When Harry Met Sally..., which remains perfect).

And before you ask, I don’t have a favorite rom-com—I’ve highlighted many of my favorites but it’s impossible to pick just one. And I assume that if you like rom-coms, you’ve already watched the classics, so instead I’ll recommend my favorite hidden gems, rom-coms I feel were not appreciated in their time and are still quite unknown to most people, even ardent fans of the genre:

• Down with Love (2003) starring Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor: A stylistically gorgeous homage to the quippy, zany, and swingy battle-of-the-sexes comedies of the ‘60s—mistaken identities, space-age interior design, and plenty of innuendo (also, Ewan McGregor at peak hotness as a dreamy ladies’ man in a tuxedo and some of the most beautiful period costumes on film I’ve ever seen)

• I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007) starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd: This one was direct-to-video so I don’t think it got a fair shot, but it’s a fun, poppy 2000s rom-com minus the toxicity, which is incredibly rare and very refreshing—delightfully smart writing courtesy of Amy Heckerling (writer/director of Clueless, but I actually like this one better!), a sweet mother-daughter dynamic with an adorable preteen Saoirse Ronan, and remarkably healthy communication and emotional maturity (there is one gimmick that deserves a big caveat, which is the very weird personification of Mother Nature that in my opinion was unnecessary and could have been rewritten as a best friend or something)

• Long Shot (2019) starring Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen: A refreshing twist on the uptight woman/bumbling fool pairing—she’s running to be the first female president but doesn’t have to be convinced to have fun, and he’s a goofy-but-ultra-principled indie journalist that’s had a crush on her since childhood—it’s sweet and unexpectedly earnest; the only person who’s actually a jerk in this movie is a caricature of Rupert Murdoch (we love to see it!) who acts as the villain

• The Lost City (2022) starring Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum: A star-studded rom-com mixed with adventure, with both crackling chemistry and a surprisingly tender meditation on grief and loss (featuring Channing Tatum as a Fabio-esque character, which makes this movie at minimum great—put Channing Tatum in more rom-coms! Fly Me to the Moon does not count, for reasons explained the deck)

• Rye Lane (2023) starring David Jonsson and Vivian Oparah: A sweet British rom-com with fresh a fresh take on editing and character development, but with all of the hallmarks of classic rom-coms—no gimmicks, just a really well-told story and absolutely magnetic chemistry; it will have you giggling and kicking your feet

I have rewatched all five of these multiple times; they’re spectacularly cast, excellently written, and very funny (which a lot of rom-coms forget—they should be funny!).

The final version goes live on LinkedIn later today, so give it a like or comment a “💘” to let me know you’ve seen it. Enjoy!

💖 jenny

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