There’s a problem with how we view romantic love in mainstream media. It’s all puppy dog eyes and smiles, with some bullshit contrived drama that has little to nothing to do with real life squabbles. Most of this comes from romantic comedies, and as we know romantic comedies are the devil. Sure, some are good for light entertainment—I’m particularly fond of The Wedding Singer—but no one takes the genre seriously. It’s formulaic, boring. We know how it’s going to end the minute it starts. Sometimes the leads are likeable, sometimes there is chemistry, but it’s mostly Bland Probably Blonde Boobs and Smiles McShirtless. I’m not saying they’re all clones, but the biggest characteristic tends to be pretty.
Another problem, particularly for TV, is how forced these couples often are. Typically, the TV couple is paired off at the start, regardless of whether they work or not. I was always baffled by the intense hatred for Lori of The Walking Dead—yeah, I didn’t like her either, but it was funny how she was the most loathed creature on a show about murderous zombies. But I think it has to do with how unappealing her relationship was with Rick. That was partly the point since she did technically cheat on him, but Lori and Rick never seemed like they had a lot of chemistry in the first place. It was painful to watch the two, and their screen time just distracted from what people wanted to see.
This also seems to be the case with Sleepy Hollow. The audience has been told that the time traveler Ichabod Crane and his witch wife Katrina are madly in love, but they never actually get to see it. Their scenes are average at best. The audience is told that they’re in love and told to root for them without ever seeing why they should. It’s a classic case of telling instead of showing, and unfortunately that’s the case for most TV romances.
Often times, romances are uneven. Only one in the couple is a character. Typically it’s the male, but not always. This character has his own story arc, his own personality, his own motives. The love interest does not. S/he is only there as an extension of the other, kind of a living prop. They don’t have their own story lines, unless it has to do with their partner. That’s their only function, so it makes for a mind numbing subplot. Mary Jane of the original Spiderman trilogy is the worst offender. All you can say about her is that she’s a redhead. Otherwise she’s the complaining girl that needs to be saved all of the time. This happens with a lot of TV love interests, making their role boring, clunky, and predictable.
The final problem has to do with unresolved sexual tension (UST). Plenty of shows with a female and male leads (and for many shippers, same sex ones) lace their interactions with a healthy dose of UST, even ones that never cross over the platonic line. This tends to make the character interactions all the more entertaining to the audience; sure some will hate it, but the UST is usually so small in the grand scheme of things that it doesn’t invoke nerd rage.
What’s the problem? Well, executives have a nasty habit of flicking the switch from unresolved to oh yeah without a doubt resolved. Now this transition works sometimes, when it feels organic, but this resolving usually happens when the show is running out of ideas, normally at its painful end. House and his boss Cuddy flirting was great—House and Cuddy actually doing it, not so much. And I was all for Scully and Mulder as a couple, but they finally get together after The X-Files had worn out its welcome. Scully and Mulder’s relationship didn’t “ruin” The X-Files, but because the show was already going downhill when they were paired up, it’s easy to see it that way. It’s a case of correlation does not equal causation, but it happens so often that we typically associate the two.
judeclee 