Parents' Guide to Four Weddings and a Funeral

This sweet confection is as feather-light as cotton candy and melts away just as quickly, though it's lots of fun while it lasts. There will no doubt be many viewers and critics who write Four Weddings and a Funeral off as trite and treacly, and they're not wrong, exactly, but Richard Curtis' 1994 movie didn't get uniformly glowing reviews when it came out either, and emerged as a romcom classic. This series, with its easy-to-like characters and snappy dialogue, may just too, after reviewers and viewers alike stop comparing it with the movie. The multi-culti cast sure feels easier to embrace -- the romcom genre's unbearable whiteness deserves to be left in the past -- and the jokes are terrific.

Of course, anyone who rewatches The Office (and everyone rewatches The Office) understands that Mindy Kaling knows her way around a joke, and has a deft hand with social commentary, too. In Four Weddings and a Funeral's first episode, when Maya awakens to desperate "My wife is on her way!" messages from her married boyfriend and has to rush around sweeping up rose petals and other mementos of their hot night, she castigates him hilariously later: "All those texts? I felt like I was in a horror movie! 'Get out, she's coming!' And the black people always get murdered first!" Maya is messy and imperfect and appealing; the quartet of best-college-friends that form the nucleus of this series is, too. Okay, so they're a little too glossy and their problems are a little too likely to be solved in one scene with a musical montage. Doesn't matter. Turn off your cerebrum for a while and just bask in feeling good.