Review: Four Weddings and a Funeral Is a Bloated, Unimaginative Slog

Beyond the requisite weddings and funeral, Hulu’s remake of director Mike Newell’s romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral freely departs from its source. Rather than tracking a man’s various relationships almost exclusively through those social gatherings, the miniseries, co-created and co-written by Mindy Kaling, casts a much wider net by following the romances of four American friends in London, as well as a neighbor, an ex-fiancée, and others, none of whom have exact analogues in the original film. At 10 episodes, the series certainly has more than enough space to explore the depths of these characters, but it fails to put that extra time to effective use, ending up as yet another cautionary tale of how ballooning a story’s size for television doesn’t inherently improve its telling.

The 1994 film’s at once limited and expansive scope—multiple weddings across multiple months but with few scenes in between—is its hook as well as its biggest flaw, as the story rarely stops long enough to develop the relationships between its characters. So the series’s decision to spend so much time on the spaces between those weddings is an ostensibly savvy one. Not long after Maya (Nathalie Emmanuel) meets cute with restless aspiring actor Kash (Nikesh Patel), the series details her job in politics, her current relationship with her married boss (Tommy Dewey), and the dynamic with her estranged college pals, who all moved to London while she stayed in New York City for her job (and boyfriend). But the series never accumulates enough such details to make its characters feel particularly defined. Flimsy depictions of characters at work and becoming romantically entangled are clearly meant to stand in for any deeper characterization.

To be fair, the most average examples of the romantic comedy tend to function this way; like middle-of-the-road action heroes or interchangeable slasher victims, the star-crossed lovers of a rom-com are often cardboard vehicles on a collision course with their genre-mandated fates over the course of two hours or less. Such characters may be functional enough to hold together a comparatively short film, but they’re hardly up to the task of anchoring a miniseries of such stupefying length as this one. Rather than dig deeper into their personalities and backstories to accommodate the extra screen time, the series opts to simply add more characters: more pretty people, more couplings, more romantic snags.

Everything quickly devolves into a parodically huge pile-up of distended will-they-or-won’t-they dramas that mingle with the dregs of the series’s mugging sitcom cartoonishness and reference-heavy banter. Where the film addresses a peripheral unrequited romance between two friends through a single conversation, the miniseries version of this subplot encompasses multiple episodes. And despite the show’s overtures about personal growth, everyone’s insipid work-related problems are all so ludicrously self-inflicted that they seem designed to pad the running time: Maya spends an episode learning that having sex with her boss doesn’t endear her to future employers, and Kash realizes that putting in his two weeks’ notice to pursue acting when he has no experience is, in fact, a bad idea.

Jettisoning the film’s narrow focus on social gatherings doesn’t free up the series so much as leave it unmoored, a muddled spiderweb of relationships that only occasionally manifests some moving development, as in the sweet, unexpected trajectory of Kash’s arranged marriage through his mosque. There are times when the series manages to balance relatable emotions of longing, devastation, and indecision with inventive comedy, like the bizarre entanglement of Craig’s (Brandon Mychal Smith) love life with a reality TV show. But the most galling thing about this new Four Weddings and a Funeral is how downright unimaginative the rest of it is, as if simply drawing out various predictable conclusions will enrich the eventual catharsis. But when distributed across so many episodes, the lovelorn spark that fuels romantic comedy doesn’t get brighter so much as dim until you hardly notice it at all.