The pilot of Bent premiered last night on NBC, and it gave me a teeny-tiny wave of deja vu that carried me back to watching another solidly mediocre NBC romantic comedy TV show. And like Free Agents, it would be my best guess that Bent is destined for cancellation sooner rather than later.
Granted, Free Agents' over-jazzed slickness and failure to characterize its protagonists are not issues for Bent. Nope, the characterizations of Pete (David Walton) and Alex (Amanda Peet) are hammered in pretty hard: she's an uptight lawyer from NorCal with a kid and an ex-husband in white collar prison; he's a man-whoring, surfing contracter from SoCal [...]
In Mindy Kaling's "Flick Chicks," part of this week's New Yorker, the Office writer explains her love for the bizarre, deeply unnatural beings that populate modern rom-coms. "I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world," she explains. "For me, there is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible."
Kaling also identifies a host of inscrutable alien entities like the Klutz, the Ethereal Weirdo and the unrealistically young rom-com mom. "[W]hen 'Mom' was an adolescent, the very week she started to menstruate she was impregnated [...]
Here's Jason Segel on Five-Year Engagement, the movie he's currently writing: "It is a romantic comedy. Our goal is Annie Hall or When Harry Met Sally and if we get within their stratosphere of substance, we will be happy. It really dissects relationships and aims to show how complicated they are over a long period of time. This is a five-year period and in that time things change and morph and the power dynamic shifts and people wane and eyes wonder and you question everything and this movie is about that in a funny way, I hope."
