While Netflix might be credited with the resurrection of the romantic comedy after their successfully marketed Summer of Love lineup back in 2018, in a twist of cruel irony the better examples of the genre have mostly been found elsewhere ever since. Sparky wedding romcom Plus One and queer Christmas comedy Happiest Season both ended up on Hulu, Universal released crowd-pleasing charmers Bros and Ticket to Paradise recently in cinemas, and Amazon found mileage in yet another Groundhog Day riff with teen-led The Map of Tiny Perfect Things. The latter streamer might have stumbled with last week’s limp Britcom Your Christmas or Mine? but there’s a far more winning assemblage of festive farce and feelings in this week’s Something from Tiffany’s, an unusually glossy December confection from producer Reese Witherspoon, in stark comparison to the Hallmark-adjacent junk that its competitor continues to churn out.
While the genre is now that much more populated once again, too many of the more recent examples have been marred by either a reticence to really lean into the formula without smugly denigrating it or, when leaning, an incompetence to do anything more than provide a weak trace over what’s come before, simply doing the rom and the com but rarely doing it well. While Something from Tiffany’s is unlikely to rise to the higher regions of any genre fan’s best-of list (it’s too frothy to even rise to the middle), there’s something engagingly earnest about its relative lack of meta self-awareness and robust attempts to look and feel like the studio meet-cutes so many of us were raised on.
