‘Let’s Make a Rom-Com’ comes to genre’s rescue
Mark Chavez thought that it would be so simple. Chavez, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based actor and comic, had seen plenty of romantic comedies. He understood the deep structure of the genre, the various story beats that pushed a couple from meet-cute to final clinch.
“I went in feeling a bit overconfident,” Chavez said during a recent video call. “I was like, ‘This will be easy! Plug and play. Just look at every rom-com!’”
The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. is releasing “Let’s Make a RomCom,” a podcast featuring Chavez alongside his fellow comedians Ryan Beil and Maddy Kelly. Over eight episodes, the three record themselves as they script an original, feature-length romantic comedy, treating the genre with commitment and sincerity. Or as much sincerity as people who knowingly pitch ideas like “Spybrarian,” “1-900 SANTA” and “Love Bermuda Triangle” can muster.
This is the show’s second season, following last year’s “Let’s Make a Sci-Fi,” which the CBC estimates has been downloaded more than 250,000 times. On that earlier podcast, the creators wrote a pilot for an earnest series called “Progeny,” set aboard a generational ship sent to colonize a new world. Devising that script meant acquiring a working knowledge of astrophysics. Writing a romantic comedy, the “Let’s Make” team learned, was harder — in large part because the genre felt exhausted. “Everything has happened,” Chavez said with a sigh. “Everything’s been done.”
“Let’s Make a RomCom” arrives at fraught moment for romantic comedy. As a film species, it has its origins in the screwball comedies and comedies of manners of the 1930s, reaching its apogee in the
1980s and 1990s, courtesy of the zippy banter of Nora Ephron and the gleaming kitchens of filmmaker Nancy Meyers.
But for decades, it has been fashionable to announce the death of the romantic comedy. It was sexual liberation that killed it. Or unfeeling studio executives. Or critics, some of whom have dinged it for its focus on white, straight, affluent characters and its reinforcing of traditional gender norms.
Yet the genre is flourishing on streaming services. In the week before Valentine’s Day, three new films were released: “Somebody I Used to Know” on Amazon Prime Video; “Your Place or Mine” on Netflix; and “At Midnight” on Paramount+. Unlike the skin of the films’ leads, the reviews have been less-than-glowing.
Is the genre fluffy? Sure. But only if you consider how and with whom people choose to spend their lives less substantive than your average car chase.
“Obvious things are there for the picking because the genre has been so one-note,” Kelly said. But there are other notes to play. Maybe the rom-com doesn’t need rescuing via some grand romantic gesture in the rain or the run to the airport; maybe it just needs what most relationships need: time, care, compassion, a few jokes.