Four Weddings and a Funeral Trailer: Rom-Com Reboots Aren’t Dead

It’s been 25 years since American audiences fell in love with the original Four Weddings and a Funeral, a very British romantic comedy written by Richard Curtis and starring Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell as a pair of star-crossed lovers who end up attending four weddings and a funeral together over the course of many years.

Mindy Kaling has decided to give that ’90s classic a 2019 update, by taking the story and stretching it out over the course of ten episodes for a miniseries on Hulu, also called Four Weddings and a Funeral. The trailer for the miniseries was just released yesterday, and appears to be a fresh spin on the rom-com upon which it is based, with an all new premise and cast.

The show was originally set to star Jessica Williams, but instead features Nathalie Emmanuel, Nikesh Patel, Rebecca Rittenhouse, John P. Reynolds, and Brandon Mychal Smith as the main cast in the story of four American friends reuniting in London for a wedding (and subsequently, three more weddings, plus a funeral, as the title would suggest). Grant does not re-appear in the series, but MacDowell makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss cameo in the trailer for the reboot.

Emmanuel takes on the role of Maya, a New York senator’s communication director who travels to London for her college friend Ainsley’s wedding and ends up staying to reconnect with some old friends—Craig, the funny one, and Duffy, the one who has not-so-secretly had feelings for Maya the whole time—and possibly a new love interest.

It is rare to see the two leads in a rom-com be people of color, in this case black and southeast Asian. In a first look of the series, Kaling, the co-creator and executive producer told Entertainment Weekly, that the original film’s themes will remain in tact, but in this update, she’s applying that framework to something that hasn’t quite been done before on Hulu.

Related: Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman Will Finally Work Together on HBO’s The Undoing