Love and Other Mistakes with Jessica Kate five favorites

Hello, reader friends! Join me in welcoming author friend Jessica Kate! She is visiting us today as part of a JustRead blog tour celebrating her new release, Love and Other Mistakes and sharing her five favorite sassy romantic television series!

 

 

five favorite tv series for sassy romance addicts

by Jessica Kate, author of Love and Other Mistakes

As a romantic comedy superfan who adores love/hate storylines, I am a major fan of the slow-burn romances that TV offers us. So without further ado, here are five of the sweetest, funniest, most addictive slow-burn romances that have ever graced my television screen:

 

New Girl

Jess and Nick. Need I say more?

This show always cracks me up as we watch four unlikely housemates all failing to achieve their life goals as they hit 30. They navigate life and love together all in one weird household. Seasons 1-3 especially are seriously my favorite TV episodes ever made.

No matter what insanity is happening in Nick and Jess’s ridiculous lives, nor how mad they may currently be at each other, these two housemates and eventual soulmates always have each other’s backs.

You’ll see this theme coming up again and again in any list of my favorite books, movies and TV. Everyone has their ‘secret spice’ – that magic ingredient that shows up in all their favorite stories, no matter the genre. Mine is ‘loyalty despite conflict’, so you’ll find love/hate storylines abound everywhere on my DVD and book shelves!

 

The Newsroom (And West Wing and Sports Night and everything else Aaron Sorkin ever wrote)

Watch enough of Aaron Sorkin’s tv shows, and you’ll realize he wrote the same story a thousand times in a thousand WILDLY ENTERTAINING ways. The workplaces and faces may change, but every Sorkin show is packed with slow-burn romances, ideological and moral conflicts, and deep, deep loyalty.

Whether it’s a bromance like between President Bartlet and Chief of Staff Leo McGarry in The West Wing, or the complicated dynamic between former lovers and current colleagues Will and Mac in The Newsroom, Sorkin’s characters would lose their careers and their lives before they’d betray one another (at least, again).

One of my favorite images from The Newsroom is from the start of Season 2. Will and Mac are a leading news anchor and executive producer. They also used to date—before Mac cheated on Will. Now they’re a reluctant professional partnership, with Mac ironically often serving as Will’s morale compass. But now she’s in hot water—a controversial news story that Mac championed has been revealed as a fraud.

Even though Mac is the one who broke Will’s heart and they fight more often than they get along, as the camera pulls out of the room where Mac is being questioned, we see Will. Sitting in the hallway. We can tell he’s been there for hours, and he’ll stay for hours more—until he knows she’s okay.

It’s those kind of awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww moments that keep me coming back for more.

 

Chuck

Oh, Chuck. The sweetest nerd and most reluctant secret agent in all of TV history.

Chuck is an IT technician who’s going nowhere in life, when he—now stay with me here—accidentally witnesses a secret government computer program that embeds every government secret into his brain via coded images.

If you can get past the premise, you’re in for a fun ride.

Poor Chuck is now walking around Burbank getting ‘flashes’ of information every time he strolls past a terrorist in the street—which is why the government embeds a crusty NSA agent as Chuck’s workmate and neighbor—and of course a beautiful CIA agent Sarah Walker as his pretend girlfriend.

Together these three battle criminal syndicates, Chuck’s overprotective sister and his hordes of loser friends at the Buy More.

Chuck’s kindness, Sarah’s practicality and their inevitable romance make them an adorable, albeit far-fetched, team.

Before New Girl, it was Chuck that held the #1 TV spot in my heart.

 

How I Met Your Mother

Ted’s love story (actually, stories) ended up being one of the more controversial endings in TV history. But whether you wanted to see Ted grow old with Tracy (the mother) or Robin, it was fun seeing both stories unfold.

But while Ted was the ‘star’, the real heart of the show was Marshall and Lily. The pair began dating their first week of college and never had eyes for anyone else. While Ted muddles his way through the dating world, these two—with one brief exception as Lily dealt with cold feet—proved that a couple who stays together could be just as entertaining as a couple who were constantly off and on.

Marshall’s steadfastness and Lily’s wildness combined with their adoration for one another made for one hilarious relationship.

 

That 70s Show

I’ll admit, I’ve never seen the end of this show, but I’ve seen the first four seasons about three times. Eric and Donna’s coming-of-age romance cracks me up, but the hidden gem of this show is Eric’s parents, Kitty and Red. Effervescent Kitty and cranky Red are one unlikely couple, but they’re the only stable family in Eric’s friendship group and they act as (reluctant) surrogate parents to all his friends—to the extent that they actually take in Hyde when his mother abandons him.

While Red and Eric never see eye-to-eye, Red puts all the kids’ wellbeing before his own and is dedicated to Kitty—most hilariously as she goes through menopause. I have a real soft spot for dads on screen (shout out to Full House!) and so this show just had to make the list.

 

Bonus Round: Kissing in the Rain web series

If you have 20 minutes to kill and want the emotional hit of about three rom com movies, check out the web series Kissing in the Rain (available on YouTube) by up-and-coming director Yulin Kuang.

Each two minute episode of season 1 shows two actors playing the roles of famous fictional couples together in a movie—and it’s always the kiss scene. Then the director yells cut, and the screen goes black, and when it returns its just the actors as themselves, in that awkward moment between takes. Over the space of seven episodes, these two actors who are destined to kiss again and again go from hating each other to falling in love.

 

 

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Say hi to Jessica in the comments and share your thoughts on her tv picks and her story, Love and Other Mistakes! Personally, I adore Chuck! My hubby and I have watched every episode at least twice!