From Heated Rivalry to Two Strangers, how romcoms are taking over TV and theatre

He is British. She is American. He is a wide-eyed optimist. She is world-weary. He loves Christmas songs. She loathes them. Naturally, they are perfect for each other. That classic opposites-attract set-up is the basis for the new Broadway musical Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York). It is one of a clutch of popular new romantic comedies warming hearts this winter across various media. There is the HBO Max hockey show and word-of-mouth sensation Heated Rivalry and the Netflix agnostic-falls-for-a-rabbi series Nobody Wants This, while the see-you-next-year movie People We Meet on Vacation has become a huge Netflix hit. There is also My Oxford Year, the coming Reminders of Him and the dependable Bridgerton, now in season four. Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) lands on Broadway beside the Tony-winning android romcom Maybe Happy Ending. “They’re all the same story, really,” says Kit Buchan, who, with Jim Barne, wrote the Two Strangers musical. “How do two people inextricably drawn together but separated by an overwhelming obstacle melt into one another?” Paul Eastwick, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, and author of Bonded by Evolution, studies romantic attraction and says the burst in romcoms is welcome. “I definitely get the sense that there are waves, and this is the time of year when we get usually one or two surprise, probably streaming, hits in this genre,” says Eastwick, who also co-hosts Love Factually, a podcast that uses science to explore the biggest romcoms. He says the genre no longer gets the respect it should, recalling that romcoms used to be big movie events that garnered awards – like Ghost, the highest-grossing film of 1990, which earned five Oscar nominations and won two. “It feels a little marginalised these days in the critic spaces and in the box-office spaces,” he says. “I hope that people don’t stop making these, because people clearly want them.” Some in the bumper crop of romcoms this winter take the formula and twist it slightly. Heated Rivalry, which had an average of 10.6 million viewers per episode in the United States, makes the lovers same-sex. Nobody Wants This, whose second season garnered 8.6 million views in its first four days of streaming, explores religious conversion. People We Meet on Vacation, which drew 17.2 million views over its January launch weekend, flips the gender of the partner who is usually the wisecracking agent of chaos. “I think that’s often what makes some of these very compelling, is where you’re able to wink and nod a little bit at the genre and have fun with it while conforming to people’s expectations at least somewhat,” Eastwick says. The creators of the musical Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) are huge fans of romcoms – their gold standard is When Harry Met Sally – even as they gently skewer the genre. But they do it out of love. “I think our greatest ambition of all was to write something that not only parodies and questions the mores of that genre and the stereotypes, but also slots into that genre in its own way,” Buchan says. Director Brett Haley had never made a romcom before adapting People We Meet on Vacation from Emily Henry’s novel. To craft the film, he reached back to ones he adored, like Jerry Maguire, My Best Friend’s Wedding and When Harry Met Sally. “They’re incredibly elevated. You care about the characters, the writing is impeccable, the performances are impeccable, the filmmaking is incredible,” he says. “To me, we just sort of lost some of that elevation. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong, by the way, with your Hallmark movies or other romcoms that are a little fluffier, a little lighter. They’re just sort of meant to be put on and enjoyed and not taken [as] art.” He took his two star-crossed lovers – Emily Bader and Tom Blyth, playing will-they-or-won’t-they friends – and earned the viewer’s trust: “It was all about grounding the comedy, the romance, the yearning, in reality.” Haley, too, argues that romcoms are not respected by critics these days. The genre that kicked off with now-classics like It Happened One Night and Bringing Up Baby is too easily dismissed in 2026. “If an action movie is elevated and checks all the boxes, you’ll find that critics go, ‘Hey, yeah, this did it. This was great,’” he says. “But when a romance does it and checks the boxes and does everything right, they go, ‘Oh, we’ve seen this before.’” Haley says that, despite the critical reaction to romcoms, he believes the average viewer yearns to sit on the sofa or go to the cinema and share the experience of falling head over heels. “It’s especially dark right now. And I think that people want to believe in love,” he says. “I think there’s real value in a film that can genuinely make you feel good, even just for an escape for two hours. There is true worth in that.”

From Heated Rivalry to Two Strangers, how romcoms are taking over TV and theatre

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}A clutch of new romantic comedies are warming hearts this winter across various media. But why are they proving so popular?

A clutch of new romantic comedies are warming hearts this winter across various media. But why are they proving so popular?