In the years following the runaway success of her 2002 indie smash My Big Fat Greek Wedding, its star and screenwriter, Nia Vardalos, spent a lot of time circling that material without quite committing to revisiting it in the cinema. She reunited with her on-screen husband John Corbett to play a new character in her directorial debut I Hate Valentine’s Day; revisited Greek culture for the unrelated romcom My Life in Ruins; and did a single season of My Big Fat Greek Life, a sitcom sequel to the original movie. Technically, the movie’s big-screen run outlasted its sitcom follow-up: the film’s last weekend in theaters, a full year after its original release, coincided with the airing of the show’s final episode.
Strange that the show made such a quick exit, because it’s the three-camera sitcom format that should fit the My Big Fat Greek Wedding sensibility perfectly; the movie was already essentially a protracted sitcom pilot, with no short supply of zany characters vying for that “and” credit. Then again, most TV comedies are a lot plottier than My Big Fat Greek Wedding – or either of the sequels Vardalos eventually did make, including the new My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3. That the films make an attempt to move at the ambling, uneven, non-clockwork pace of real life is part of their charm. The elements that seem most ill-advised – the lack of story beyond “family gets older”, the long gaps between the sequels that facilitate that getting older – are really their secret strengths.
