Simply by invoking the name Juliet, Hulu’s Rosaline, a comic retelling of Shakespeare from the perspective of Juliet’s jilted cousin, is working in a crowded field. On the sliding scale of loose literary adaptations, Rosaline lands within the territory of the purely enjoyable modernizations – Clueless, She’s the Man, 10 Things I Hate About You. In the realm of anachronistic period comedies, it’s working in a similar lane to Autumn de Wilde’s biting Emma, Lena Dunham’s delightfully profane Catherine Called Birdy or the ahistorical feminism of the Apple TV series Dickinson. It’s certainly better than this summer’s Persuasion, Netflix’s Fleabag-inspired Jane Austen spin which flattened the novel’s abundant wit into a slangy, fourth wall-smashing drag.
All of which is to say: Rosaline, directed by Karen Maine from a script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber (the writing pair behind 500 Days of Summer, The Spectacular Now and The Fault in Our Stars), understands what makes a good adaptation: a sense of humor at least on par with if not exceeding the original, lighthearted lines with serious delivery, crackling romantic chemistry. And in the case of Rosaline, an unmissable lead in Kaitlyn Dever as a lovelorn medieval schemer left on read.
