It’s no secret that the rom-com has been going through something of a slump in recent years. My personal enjoyment of Freakier Friday notwithstanding, the genre that gave us the makeover montage and a lot of really bad advice has felt a bit stale since the aughts heyday of Blue Crush, The Princess Diaries, Miss Congeniality, and so many other girl-gets-guy-but-also-has-a-Growing-Arc gems. More recent offerings—from The Idea of You to Netflix’s My Oxford Year—have left me longing for a time when the economy was okay-ish, NPR was still funded, and Emma Stone still made broad comedies.
Obviously, Stone stans (Stoneheads? Stone-iacs? Stoners? Okay, I think we’re going with “Stoners”) have been well fed over the last few years, what with the two-time Oscar-winning 36-year-old actor doing some of the best work of her career in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, Poor Things, and Kinds of Kindness, as well as playing a deranged home-flipping influencer on Showtime’s The Curse. Still, I can’t help feeling nostalgic for the days when she was a fixture in buzzy 2010s-era rom-coms like Easy A, Crazy, Stupid, Love, and La La Land.
One Emma Stone rom-com role that I think about all the time last for approximately 10 seconds. In 2012, 30 Rock—a show well-known for its dazzling array of celebrity cameos—lampooned the romantic-comedy trope of just shoving a ton of famous people into a 90-minute movie with a terrible script and good lighting and hoping for the best with an ad for a brand-new Jenna Maroney film titled Martin Luther King Day. In it, Stone plays a classic lovelorn office worker not-so-secretly pining for Andy Samberg.