In these reboot/remake/remix-heavy times, there’s something bizarre and inevitable about Mindy Kaling reworking Four Weddings and a Funeral as a 10-part series for Hulu. It’s as MadLibs as anything else we’ve seen commissioned of late, whether it be Apple’s Emily Dickinson comedy series with Hailee Steinfeld or Epix turning the origin story of Batman’s butler Alfred into a 007-lite action show. It never ends, and it’s with a certain sense of exhaustion that one approaches another one of these Frankenshows, conjured into being via what sounds like a drunk party pitch given to an executive with more money than sense.

But as a fan of the original and the admittedly flawed London-set romantic comedies it spawned, it’s also hard not to remain cautiously optimistic, especially given how Working Title has mostly stopped making them. In resurrecting the subgenre’s patient zero, Kaling, along with 30 Rock and Great News writer Tracey Wigfield, has decided upon some vital tweaks. Richard Curtis’s all-white upper-middle-class chums have been replaced with a more realistically diverse cross-section, and the sentimental tone has now been married with a light smattering of knowingly meta snark. It’s a show crafted by writers who know these films inside and out, and rather than playing like a straight-up remake of Four Weddings, it feels more like a ramshackle greatest hits assembly job, stitching together pieces all the way from Love Actually to Bridget Jones’s Diary.

In Kaling’s remixed version, Hugh Grant is now Game of Thrones alumna Nathalie Emmanuel, who plays Maya, an American speechwriter heading to London to catch up with old friends. At the airport she has a meet-cute with Kash (Nikesh Patel) before later finding out he’s actually the fiance of her best friend Ainsley (Rebecca Rittenhouse) because, obviously. There’s also Duffy (John Reynolds) who’s had a crush on Maya since college, Ainsley’s bitchy upper-crust neighbour Gemma (Zoe Boyle) and Craig (Brandon Mychal Smith) who’s hiding a big secret from his girlfriend Zara (Sophia La Porta). Their lives and loves intersect in various ways as the plot forces them into five, ahem, major life events.

Once you get past the fact that the show barely resembles its source material and that any comparison would not work in its favour anyway, there are simple pleasures to be had. It’s never less than watchable, spoonfeeding us familiar scenarios, intermixed with sweeping shots of London, easily digestible in a comforting, unchallenging sort of way. The writing is patchy, forcing in a few too many awkward pop culture references and crowbarring in character detail in an often painfully clumsy way (“Maybe I only like it because I watched it with my mum on Broadway a couple of months before she died”), but the performers try their best. Emmanuel is hugely engaging if a little too composed to pull off the requisite moments of bumbling social ineptitude, while Patel grows with confidence and charm by every episode. But as a sort of Kristin Scott Thomas substitute, Boyle struggles to sell what could have been an enjoyably snippy sidekick. Expanding a romantic comedy into a 10-part series does lead to an interesting challenge for the writers because it’s not enough to focus on just two characters and instead, supporting roles are forced into becoming more integral. Suddenly “sassy friend” has a life outside of giving quippy advice to the lead, and this plays out with mixed results, some storylines proving more interesting than others.

John Reynolds in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Photograph: Ollie Upton/Hulu

Underpinning the series is a desire to appeal to underserved romcom fans and the show’s puppyish attempts to scratch that itch often hit their mark in a way that Netflix’s bland glut of algorithmic misfires often fail. What the show does have in common with those films though is a flat, Lifetime movie aesthetic but shot on location, it does at least work as travel porn for foreign viewers looking for escapism. Despite the setting, it feels very much tailored to an American audience with its mostly American cast and writing that rarely feels specific to the UK, an irony given the overwhelmingly British film it’s based on.

Four Weddings and a Funeral is barely a remake, and that’s probably for the best, playing out with so many differences that you’ll struggle to remember what you’re supposed to be watching. It just about works despite its redundant concept because it so desperately wants to be filed alongside the romantic comedies it so shamelessly apes and the playbook it works from remains hard to resist. In the almost words of David Cassidy, errr, when he was still, errr, with the Partridge Family, I think I like it.