Bridget Jones's Diary
The romantic comedy of its era. A shameless reworking of Pride and Prejudice that somehow recaptured everything Austen understood about how love is obscured by self-consciousness and social performance. Bridget's voice is the voice of everyone who has ever confused themselves about their own desires, and Darcy's love for her is all the more satisfying because she is so gloriously imperfect.
Bridget logs her weight in every entry, hovering around nine stone while narrating herself as an elephant, and the calorie arithmetic curdles a decade or three on. Daniel Cleaver is workplace harassment played as naughty fun. Strip the Pride and Prejudice scaffold and the plot is thin; the diary gimmick does the heavy lifting, then tires.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
