...or, "They Ruined The Show When They Let Those Two Get Together!"

It's an accusation I've been hearing hurled at a lot of shows—most of which I've never watched—over the years. The thing is, though, I've always had a difficult time believing it, and this is why.

The thing about accusing the writers of ruining a show when they decide to resolve UST, especially when it's been carefully preserved over a period of several years, is that it's usually rather a self-fulfilling prophecy. It happened with Get Smart; the network that owned the rights to the series at the time forced the writers to marry off Max and 99 in season 4 in hopes of boosting ratings that were already falling. Somewhat unsurprisingly, it didn't work—it was forced and rushed, which goes to show that obeying the dictates of the Almighty Studio isn't always the best way to go. Lois & Clark wasn't so much ruined by the characters' romance as by the writers' fears that there would be no more stories to tell after the characters exchanged wedding vows, which resulted in storylines that frustrated much of the audience and left us feeling like we'd been led around by our noses. (I'm thinking about the "Clark Marries a Clone" story arc in particular here.) And in The X-Files, the relationship between Scully and Mulder only became consciously romantic sometime in season 7, when the ratings had already been slipping. (Even then, it was in such a way that there are still people who say that despite the child that both characters acknowledged as Mulder's as well as Scully's, the kiss at the end of season 8, the Shadow Man's crack about Scully inviting Mulder to her bed on "one lonely night" and the way that they're cuddled up in bed together at the end of the show's final episode, Mulder and Scully never allowed their relationship to be anything but platonic.) The increasingly tangled mytharc, somewhat clumsy attempts to re-create the original believer-sceptic tension (and UST, of course) with two otherwise good new characters, and Mulder's absence from half of season 8 and all but the last two episodes of season 9 were, quite arguably, more significant factors in the show's decline than "OMG they KISSED the story is OVER!!!!!"

And then there's the way that we tend to think of fictional weddings as happy ENDINGS. In Western culture, it's an idea that's fed to us from the time we're small children; except for the words "happily ever after", we never see what happens to the Beautiful Princess and the Handsome Prince after the wedding. Many of us never quite manage to escape it, either. Romantic comedies usually end with an engagement, a wedding or at least some kind of confirmation of the lead couple's commitment to each other. We are supposed to assume that all their problems are now over and they will blithely sail through the rest of their lives together because it's Meant To Be—but also that there can't be anything interesting to say about them anymore because "JUST MARRIED" is also "just...married" and everybody knows that nothing interesting ever happens to married couples. They just sit around being in love with each other, right?

(Of course, this entire line of thinking makes me wonder why, if marriage is supposed to be boring, we're all supposed to want it. However, that's not the point of this post, and perhaps a subject that's better discussed elsewhere.)

My point is that if UST is drawn out for too long, it ceases to be interesting and just becomes boring and annoying. Either resolve it somehow or get rid of it in some clever way, though this latter solution could alienate a significant number of audience members if it's not handled right. Allowing UST between characters to be resolved isn't necessarily the end of the story, and if it's done right, it doesn't have to lead to a show's demise.