While it looks like the romantic comedy genre is kind of growing back with its audience, Netflix seems to generate a ton of them over the past year alone with positive responses for their original content. Maybe Someone Great could create a new spin and make a break-up premise successful or feeling love doesn’t exist at all.
In the streaming service’s recent rom-com, Jenny (Gina Rodriguez) is a music journalist living in New York City when she gets broken up by her longtime boyfriend Nate (Lakeith Stanfield) after she’s gonna be leaving for a job opportunity in San Franciso. But before she leaves and, she and her best friends Blair (Brittany Snow) and Erin (DeWanda Wise) go on one last journey on the night out of town to have some fun on their own.
This is actually the first time I watched one of the romantic comedies that have come from Netflix, believe or not. I heard most are surprisingly good (Set It Up, To All The Boys I Loved Before), but nothing looked like something that I would be interested. Writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson makes her directorial debut in what turns out be to a solid effort in what felt like a slightly better version of How to Be Single.
The chemistry flowing with Rodriguez, Snow, and Wise never fell short. All three of these ladies act like actual friends, and they seemed to have fleshed-out personalities that we follow through in hopes of achieving them. Rodriguez, in particular, shows comedic chops. Granted, I still never watched Jane the Virgin, but why isn’t she in more comedies?
This also got some genuine laughs out of me. Nothing that was on the level of Girls Trip, but it earns those laughs when the jokes didn’t become unbearable, thankfully.
Predictable? Yep. Some might say Someone Great isn’t exactly going for originality, and that’s kind of true. It consists of flashbacks of Jenny and Nate’s relationship to the sweet beginning to the end of it all. But Kaytin Robinson does a safe job at avoiding some of those cliches and shows that our main character wants to have fun with her friends and their respective relationships.
It does provide a meaningful message about friendships and relationships, and it shows between the trio throughout this. No matter how tough a situation ends up with somebody you loved for a long time and any situation with yourself, your friends are there to make it through it all, for better or worse. And that’s something I can easily appreciate this.
For Someone Great, it’s something to casually watch when you can’t find anything else to sit through. Probably isn’t gonna be remembered a whole lot hours after finishing watching it, but it was better than I expected.
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