Last weekend, I stumbled across a British romantic comedy on Peacock that I’d never heard of, Man Up. It has a really fun meet-cute premise, plus actual character growth arcs and one of the better “rom-com dashes” near the end that I’ve seen (if you’re going to throw in the cliche, you may as well have fun with it).

A terminally single woman gets mistaken by a man for his blind date at a train station. She’s getting tired of her sister nagging her to put herself out there and take chances to find love, so she impulsively decides to let him go on thinking she’s his date and goes off with him for a night out. But when she finds that she actually likes him she has to worry about how and when to own up to what she did and how he’ll react to the truth. And it turns out that he has his own hidden agenda behind this date as he’s recovering from a painful divorce.

My scoring system for romcoms is that they have to be both funny and romantic. I want to smile much of the way through and laugh at least one or two times, and I want to want the couple to get together rather than wanting to tell them to run. This one actually works on both counts. There are some cringeworthy moments where you feel secondhand embarrassment, but those are also really funny. Mixed in among the wackiness is some genuine emotional depth. There are times when you want to slap both characters, but then there are also moments when you want to hug them, and the ending is really satisfying because you feel like they’ve both learned something valuable and changed.

Lake Bell and Simon Pegg are the leads, and they seem to have tapped the National Theatre for the deep-bench supporting cast full of noted British actors. Even the room service waiter who appears in one scene is a recognizable actor. I’d say the tone is similar to Bridget Jones’s Diary, in that we have a somewhat hapless single woman in London who gets into scrapes, and it can get somewhat raunchy in moments. For the most part, it’s pretty grounded, like something you could believe would happen (apparently, the inspiration behind the script is that the writer was mistaken for someone’s blind date, and she wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t immediately corrected the guy), but then there are a few events that go over the top in a rather delightful way.

As I said, I’d never heard of this film, but it was exactly the sort of thing I’ve been wishing existed that they don’t make nearly enough of. It’s about ten years old, so would have come out during a time when I could walk to a movie theater and went to movies frequently. I don’t know if it got a wide release in the US or if it was just badly marketed. It’s on Peacock now, so if you’re craving a romcom, this one might be fun. It got me started playing with romcom ideas, like how could you take that premise and add magic to it?