Aline Brosh McKenna

A New York lawyer is offered partnership, meets an old summer boyfriend on the pavement, quits, packs and follows him to West Covina, telling everyone this has nothing to do with him. That is the McKenna opening in miniature: a woman who is excellent at her work tells a lie about her heart, and the script spends the rest of its running time taking the lie apart. Andy Sachs fetching Miranda Priestly's coffee in The Devil Wears Prada (2006) is the same woman at a different desk. The office is where McKenna's characters are funny; home is where they are found out.

She came to it sideways, as a freelance magazine writer in New York who took a six-week screenwriting course and moved to Los Angeles in 1991. The first produced feature was Three to Tango (1999); The Devil Wears Prada made her name, and 27 Dresses (2008) confirmed what she would be hired to do. Then the turn: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019), co-created with Rachel Bloom, which she ran and wrote and, for four episodes, directed. She directed her first feature, Your Place or Mine, in 2023, and went back to David Frankel and Miranda Priestly for The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026).

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the work we would send a stranger to. It takes the ugliest phrase in dating and spends 62 episodes finding the woman inside it, two songs at a time, with more patience and less cruelty than the title promises. We laughed at the songs and then found the sadness under them had got to us more than we expected, because Rebecca Bunch is never let off the hook and never treated as a punchline either. It is longer than it needs to be. It is still the fullest thing she has done.

The weakness shows when the material is safe. The dossier of her career says the work sometimes stays inside the romantic-comedy shape even when it means to complicate it, and 27 Dresses is the usual example. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is the sharper case: the right subject, the death of magazines, and the wrong method, since nearly everything at stake is explained across a desk before the film cuts to a frock. A film about luxury that has plainly been paid for by luxury never solves that, and McKenna's script does not try. The satire ends exactly where the sponsors would start to mind.

She has said she tries not to peddle "the idea that a relationship is going to make you perfect or whole", and on television she kept that promise for four years. She directs now. The next thing worth waiting for is the one where nobody has paid for the clothes.