Why ‘Someone Great’ Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson Wrote a Rom-Com Lead Who Chooses Herself

If you’re waiting for the couple in Someone Great, a new Netflix romantic comedy starring Gina Rodriguez and LaKeith Stanfield, to get back together then you’re going to be waiting a long time.

“That’s the movie ending we expect,” writer/director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson said in a phone call with Decider last week. “Especially in this genre, we expect that in the end, someone wins someone. I’m tired of people winning people.”

So Robinson, who also created the tragically short-lived MTV drama Sweet/Vicious, decided to do the damn thing herself. It is, she says, based on her own experiences—as astute viewers might guess, given that she shares a name with her protagonist—but it is not autobiographical. Rodriguez stars as Jenny, a New York journalist in her mid-twenties, who we meet just after she’s been dumped by her boyfriend of nine years, Nate (Stanfield).

“I got dumped in New York twice, actually,” Robinson, who is 31, said with a laugh. “Once in my early 20s, then once in my mid-20s, when I decided to choose myself and writing. I knew that if I really wanted to pursue this career, I would have to move back to L.A. That one was really close to Jenny and Nate’s breakup.”

Let’s be clear: This is not an anti-romance film, and Robinson’s an avid fan of the genre. (She lists Nora Ephron, Kiwi Smith and Karen McCullah as just a few of her inspirations.) Someone Great slowly pieces together Jenny and Nate’s relationship via flashback, and we can tell right away it’s a good one.

Robinson succinctly hits on the rom-com beats we know and love: They meet at a party in college where they share, as Wise’s character dryly notes, “some strong prolonged eye contact.” They have great sex. Nate supports Jenny’s writing. Jenny supports Nate’s community work. Nate blurts out “I love you” while Jenny is ordering Chinese food for them on Seamless and says something dorky. Jenny says it back a few minutes later while Nate is in the shower (causing him to get soap in his eyes, of course). Slowly, the fighting begins. Jenny has to bail on Nate for work. Nate accuses her of not being present when she meets his new co-workers. Eventually, when the relationship does dissolve—Nate’s not willing to do long distance when Jenny gets her dream job in San Francisco—it’s no one’s fault.

“The saddest thing to me about a relationship dissolving is when it has nothing to do with anyone being a bad guy,” Robinson said. “That is the deepest, truest heartbreak you can feel—because it kind of smashes that illusion that love is enough. Sometimes, it’s not.”

What fills the void for Jenny—and for the majority of the film—is her two best friends, Erin (DeWanda Wise) and Blair (Brittany Snow). “This film is really an amalgamation of not just the relationships I had in my twenties, but the women that have helped me up and supported me,” Robinson explained. “It’s much more a love letter to those women than it is about any of the men that I’ve dated.”

In the present day, the girls are on a mission to get VIP passes for a music festival, but really they’re just fucking around— reminiscing, making each other laugh and saying goodbye. It’s noteworthy, too, that though they are all young millennial women, each comes to the group with different experiences and cultural backgrounds—Jenny is Latina, Erin is black and gay, Blair is white. For Robinson, diversity was a no-brainer: “I wanted it to feel like New York,” she said. “I think New York is one of the most diverse places in the entire world. There was no other way I was going to cast this movie.”

Behind the scenes, she applied a similar philosophy: “When you’re telling a story that is so inherently about women and for women, women behind the camera is a no-brainer,” she said of her female producers, cinematographers, costume designers, DPs, and more. That said, she continued, “it’s not just about them being women. I was never going to hire a woman if I truly did not feel like she was the right person for the job. As a first-time director, if I didn’t do a good job—if I didn’t give the studio what I promised and what I sold them—I don’t get another shot.”

In the end, as hopefully, you’ve guessed, Jenny and Nate do not get back together. Jenny does dream about it: Nate finds her at “their spot in Washington Square Park and says they’ve made a mistake, that what they have is pure and real, that they owe it to each other to try to make happily ever after work. It’s a perfect romantic climax that perhaps may fake some viewers out as the film’s true ending. Then Jenny wakes up.

“Those back-to-back scenes—that’s always been my reality of breaking up with someone,” Robinson said.

For Jenny, it’s not a tragic moment, but it’s not quite a triumphant moment, either. It’s an acknowledgment that this era in her life is over, but that the love she had with Nate was real—and, she says in a poem she writes to him on the subway, will always be real.

“You take a piece of every relationship with you for the rest of your life,” Robinson said. “I just broke up with my boyfriend of four-and-a-half years. There will be a piece of him in me, and that relationship in me, for the rest of my life. So often we’re told if you break up with someone: ‘Throw that person away! Never think about them again. Move onto the next person!’ It’s like, no,  those people make you who you are. Take all of that with you. That’s why I wrote the poem the way that I did: Shattered glass glitters. You can look at it like it’s shattered glass, or you can look at it as beautiful pieces of glass that are catching the light.”

Stream Someone Great on Netflix