(Untitled)

[dotsomething]

Dear flist,

There are a number of you who need to read this article in Slate right now, this minute. Here's an excerpt:

Television hates nothing more than a happy couple....we've all grown used to the couples we love waiting a lot longer than two years to get it on. The problem seems to be that writers and actors are unable to reliably generate

Comments

[burger_eater]

If the show builds its drama on the relationship and if "Will they do it?" is the major dramatic question, there can't help but be a let down when they finally get it on. The question is answered--that story is over, and it ended on a (hopefully) powerful moment.

If the show tries to continue to use the relationship as a source of drama, what is going to be the major dramatic q? "Will they stay together?" is the most obvious. They fight, they make up. She scratches his car, he breaks her great grandmother's vase--but hey, the most important thing is that they're together. Then her ex takes a sabbatical from helping refugees in Logrovia with Doctors without Borders, and he tracks down a sexy international jewel thief and he's not sure if he wants to bust her or bed her.

Nick and Nora work because their relationship is not part of the dramatic stakes. They have conflict and banter and real love between them, but you don't watch the show wondering if they're going to divorce.

You can start with Dave and Maddie, I guess, but they need to become Nick and Nora once they get together. If not, you get (IMO) tedious soap opera relationship stuff.

[dotsomething]

That's probably why this is such a problem in TV series, how do you keep it interesting and not soap-opera? The Nick and Nora stuff worked in part because the tone was light--it was comedy with a bit of social satire. The serious moments were rare. Moonlighting started as a comedy with moments of drama. If they'd kept the wacky humor, the Howard Hawkes style overlapping dialogue and fighting and occasional cross dressing and pie-in-the-face, that could have prevented it from wallowing as Maddie and David dealt with relationship stuff.

Too much of the time with series, the couple everyone wants to see together is kept apart or breaks up because of reasons that start to feel forced or arbitrary. Which then makes the audience care less about the characters, which leads to dropping ratings, and then to cancellation. Ironically, the artificial obstacles were dropped in to boost ratings in the first place.

[burger_eater]

That's probably why this is such a problem in TV series, how do you keep it interesting and not soap-opera?

As you say, the way to do it is make it funny. Sitcoms are set in the home and in the workplace, and most of the ones set at home spend years playing out the stresses and tribulations of connubial heaven. Years. Can you imagine a drama about a troubled couple that lasted as long as MAD ABOUT YOU?

Is there a sitcom that successfully showed a couple courting--and I mean for several seasons--then continued showing the couple after the sex? CHEERS leaps to mind, but it wasn't exactly a winner once the Sam/Diane relationship started.

Dramas typically have a mechanism to bring continual influx of outside dramatic situations--they're solving crimes or diagnosing patients or handling legal cases. Without that main story engine, you get the endless (and uninteresting, IMO) family crises of soap opera.

So I think a Dave/Maddie post-coital show could work if they were willing to drop the relationship storyline and potentially lose the audience that watched for that aspect of the drama.

By the way, MEDIUM has a working family relationship in it--one that's well-handled, too.

[dotsomething]

Dramas typically have a mechanism to bring continual influx of outside dramatic situations--they're solving crimes or diagnosing patients or handling legal cases. Without that main story engine, you get the endless (and uninteresting, IMO) family crises of soap opera.

There have been long-running married couples on TV and they're all in the night-time soap category.

There was Thirtysomething (which I classify as pure drama, not night-time soap...I'm such a TV snob ;) but I didn't love that show the way I love the genre shows.

A lot of the shows with couples that imploded were in fact detective/genre/outside problems type shows. I agree with what you're saying. If you've got a show with outside pressures, concrete problems/save the world storylines each week, then there should be able to be some post-coital couples. Yet there aren't in the genre category, except as supporting characters or part of a big ensemble where the couple only gets a small portion of the screen time. This is part of why Lost is so smart--it's got things built in to avoid the pitfalls of a show that features a married couple. Such as not focusing solely on the married couple.