Starstruck creator Rose Matafeo has "massive sense of guilt" about making a rom-com

Like J. Robert Oppenheimer telling President Truman about the blood on his hands, only to have Truman mock his guilt and remind him that he’s the one with blood on his hands, New Zealand comedian Rose Matafeo seems to have mixed feelings about what she’s putting out into the world with her romantic comedy TV show Starstruck—which airs on the BBC in the U.K. and Max in the U.S.. (Truman in this scenario is the rom-com genre itself, which existed long before Starstruck and will most likely exist long after.)

Speaking with The Guardian, Matafeo explained that she worries that, with Starstruck, she has “added to the canon of a genre” that she thinks is “maybe bad” in the way it’s “limiting for women in its presentation of romantic love and fulfillment.” Now, that seems like a spicy sentiment out of context, but the context actually makes her perspective on this seem even more solidified. The rom-com thing partially came up because of a story Matafeo told The Guardian about an interview she did with an unnamed U.K. newspaper where the interviewer asked if hosting Junior Taskmaster will “bring out the mother” in her, and though she tried to dodge the question because it made her uncomfortable, the interviewer apparently “pushed it hard” and left her “seething” over the idea that a woman who doesn’t have kids is either “totally miserable” or “making a political statement.”

Matafeo says she got in her head “in that classic overthinking way” because of how society refuses to just let women live their lives, which apparently got her thinking about Starstruck and the larger rom-com genre (which she says she has “a lot of respect for”) and how she feels “massive sense of guilt” for contributing to it. The tone of the interview isn’t quite as serious as this all makes it sound, as—despite the way she’s phrasing it—the message Matafeo wants to present is less “rom-coms are evil” and more “it’s okay to be single and/or not have kids if you want to be single and/or not have kids,” which is not a message that the rom-com genre is generally built for.