Romantic Comedy Resurgence: Why I Think Romantic Comedy Is Officially Back

As a romantic comedy writer, I say that the golden age of romantic comedies was in the 1990s-2000s. In this era we have classics like Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You, She's the Man, and most of Richard Curtis' films. As a teenager in the 2000s, I was obsessed with them. They were fun, light-hearted, and at times gave good moral advice. And the books I loved were the same. A Princess's Diary; Angus, flip-flops and frontal kisses; anything by John Green.

Then a crucial change occurred. A book whose effects on YA are still felt to this day. Dusk.

Don't get me wrong, I too went through a vampire phase when I was a teenager. I always love a good romance. But we have entered into a cultural change, a shift towards more serious things. Then came sci-fi dystopia, and now we've come full circle to dystopia with shows like Succession and real crime takes off.

But we are back. The people demanded and the romantic comedy returned in full glory, whether Crazy Rich Asians take the box office by storm, or people secretly gorge themselves on all three Princess Switches on Netflix. For what? Because people want joy. We want to see people fall in love, even if they're in relationships all the time. We want to see them grow as people, it gives us hope that we can too. And we want to swoon over leading men (who may be better than the ones we meet in real life).

And now even more people can see themselves in romantic comedies. All the films and books I mentioned in the introduction have one thing in common: they are all about white characters. That's not to say that I didn't identify with them or that I didn't find anything in them, but I never really saw myself in them, as I do now. I have never on Netflix. And They both die in the end And Red, white and royal blue, both huge bestsellers, are both LGBTQ+ romances. Audiences learn to see that love is universal, across race and sexuality, and this opens the genre further than ever before.

When I started writing Mercury in Me, I wanted to write the book I loved as a teenager. And it’s an ode to the romcom genre. I followed tried and tested paths, but with my own twist. Maya, my slightly self-obsessed but heart of gold character, goes on her own journey with the leading man of the school musical, Harry. There are declarations of feelings, romantic gestures and multicultural and intergenerational conflicts. I hope that somewhere, a British Indian teenager can see herself in it, so that everyone loves it for what it is: a classic romantic comedy.

The Mercury In Me is published by UCLan Publishing on June 6, 2024