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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

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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.