Will They or Won't They

So I began the idea of writing this by reading up on the issues on tvtropes, and well, as things happen on tv tropes, I got hella sidetracked.  So here are I guess three links to form the basis of what I'm talking about.

So now that that's out of the way, rant on...

I hate it when television shows succumb to this styling of plotting and drama.  I watch few enough shows as it is to prevent seeing this kind of thing happen, but it almost always comes into play.

Any show whose plot revolves around creating sexual tension between the cast members to an infuriating "will they or won't they" level, or even just feels the need to pair up all the cast members in relationships fails on so many dramatic levels.

The obvious reason is it's one dimensional, effectively taking any dramatic depth from a dramatic show.

But on comedies it drags them, and makes them unfunny.  This is really where it kills.  WTOWT single handedly turned Friends from a mediocre but sometimes watchable comedy into a half-hour long torture session of half-hearted dramedy (half).

Maybe I'm just a romantic, who thinks that comedies should be pure -- a saturated mess of realism and surrealism, made of so many layers of jokes there is no space for a laugh track, packed so densely you don't want to laugh lest you miss the next joke.

As a comedic device, it can sometimes work (emphasis on sometimes).  The problem is, well, depending on I'm willing to blame at any time, either producers for mistaking these jokes for actual plot bits and forcing them along, or writers for losing ideas and resorting to these sort of cheap tricks to drag the show to its far away grave.

In dramas, well I've seen the worst.  By the time I had stopped watching new episodes of Degrassi, it was only about who was hooking up with whom.  There wasn't anything else to anything, and anything that might be something else was inexorably tied who was hooking up with whom.  I'll always have seasons 1-8.

-- Knuttel