‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ is rom-com catnip: Review

If you know one thing about Mindy Kaling, the co-creator of Hulu’s Four Weddings and a Funeral reboot along with The Mindy Project co-conspirators Matt Warburton and Tracey Wigfield, you know that she loves romantic comedies. It takes minimal exposure to Kaling’s work with Hulu to understand that she’d happily live in this world if she could, and that almost every piece of media she offers us is supposed to provide us the same escape.

Four Weddings and a Funeral, like the team’s last project, is by no means a brilliant addition to its genre. It features a promising cast and established writing team, all unfairly burdened with delivering a revelatory rom-com they were never going to make. What they did make is perfectly fun and fine, a breezy way to pass the evenings as summer winds wearily toward winter.

Four Weddings and a Funeral is the story of four college besties – Maya (Game of Thrones‘ Nathalie Emmanuel), Ainsley (The Mindy Project‘s Rebecca Rittenhouse), Duffy (Search Party‘s John Reynolds), and Craig (You’re The Worst‘s Brandon Mychal Smith) – reunited in London as grownups as they navigate the tumultuous sea of love and relationships. The premiere finds Duffy madly in love with Maya, as he has been for years; Craig in a happy relationship with Zara (Sophia La Porta); Maya dating her smarmy politician boss Todd (Tommy Dewey); and Ainsley engaged to Kash (Nikesh Patel).

Before we even get most of that information, however, Maya loses a bag at the airport and it is none other than Kash who helps her find it. They share a classic rom-com meet-cute: At first he’s glib and aloof, and then they’re laughing in a storage room as she shows him clips of Mamma Mia! and demands he admit its cinematic superiority. There’s immediate chemistry between Emmanuel and Patel and a cute, carefree quality to the writing in their scenes together. But subsequent episodes suffer from keeping them apart to further the plot.

In the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, and in other media to which this iteration might be compared (Lovesick, You’re The Worst), romance is not the primary takeaway. The main draw, and the Hulu series’ forte, is the friend group at its center. A mid-season rift between Ainsley and Craig has more emotional impact than the floundering courtships present in that same episode. When Craig confides his biggest secret in Maya without thinking twice about it, other characters wonder if there’s something going on between them, yet there can be no mistaking a tender and platonic bond from the audience perspective. 

What the love stories lack is an anchor. Kash and Maya’s is established in the first episode, but the drawn-out timeline of television versus film works against it. By episode four, there are enough characters and balls in the air that Kash and Maya’s dalliance falls squarely in with Other Things That Have Happened and not necessarily Things We’d Like To Revisit (the only item in this category is Craig’s daughter). Because they’ve spent so little time together at that point, you can forget they’ve spent any time together at all. The characters themselves comfortably pursue separate romantic futures without sparing much thought for the one they could share together. The pairing picks up steam in episodes 6 and 7, but those are still weeks away for viewers who may give up by then.

There’s a stilted quality to some of the performances that feels less a reflection of the actors themselves than a style choice that was also present on The Mindy Project. Here, like there, Kaling, Warburton, and Wigfield flounder most visibly in building out the secondary cast members, generally underwriting Zara and making an insufficient case for Ainsley’s English friend Gemma (a wonderfully uptight Zoe Boyle). The plotting also doesn’t lend itself to making us invest in either of them, to the point where critical character moments fall flat because you simply don’t care.

At its best, Four Weddings and a Funeral has the potential to be rom-com catnip. It’s full of nods to the original film and scored by what must be Kaling’s own rom-com soundtrack Spotify playlist. There are sweeping declarations of love, pivotal scenes in the rain, hopeless turns of timing, fluttery missed connections. At its worst, the scenes feel like filler, needlessly padding a movie plot that they barely follow as it is.

Even when the execution falls flat, the idea behind Four Weddings is a grand one. So much of the classic romantic comedy genre is uncomfortable to revisit due to sexism, patriarchy, and the sheer caucasity of the actors who were considered worthy, in another time, to portray romantic love. Reinvigorating our favorite stories with today’s values and more diverse representation is not only admirable but necessary. It’s why Crazy Rich Asians was crucial and why Set It Up was a revelation. It’s why I grinned like a fool every time Kash’s family or friends speak Urdu on-screen and why Reynolds’ subtle advancement of the jilted-best-friend trope is more endearing and less creepy than almost every prior version. 

Being in a rom-com renaissance means everything won’t be a sure hit. Four Weddings and a Funeral isn’t trying to uproot a genre, but to offer a light, entertaining entry into it. It does that much, if little more. Whether it’s enough is up to the audience.

Four Weddings and a Funeral airs Wednesdays on Hulu. The first four episodes are now available.