Now both are essentially gone, and we’re making do with substitutions, decoys and mirages: things that seem like romantic comedy but are actually fizzy soap operas ( “Crazy Rich Asians”), teen movies ( “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before”), funny dramas ( “You’re the Worst”), TV Tinder ( “Dating Around”) or sports ( “The Bachelor”). But as long as Heigl was around, so were romantic comedies, and that was something. Her time as a romantic-comedy star was more a feat of survival than a cause for celebration. Instead, she was tough, stubborn, gainfully employed and - like most of the women in these movies, by that point - counterproductively heartless, tolerant of whatever partnership the plot backed her into. Heigl didn’t get to show the luminance, flintiness or idiosyncrasy of her romantic-comedy forebears she was given too few moments of wit or insight.
To watch her withstand the jeers of the boy-men in “Knocked Up,” the cave-manning of Gerard Butler in “The Ugly Truth” or the bridesmaid-outfit montage in “27 Dresses” was to witness a genre’s assault on one of its last dedicated practitioners. In the mid- to late 2000s she spent five years doing romantic comedies, or what was left of them by the time she got there. I have a confession to make: I miss Katherine Heigl.