Recently I've seen a couple of posts debating again whether or not the old adage that resolving sexual tension between a couple spells doom for a tv show. As I'm not familiar with the fandoms they cite - not named so I don't accidentally spoil fans of said shows - I felt inspired to some ponderings of my own.

Now, personally I might only rarely ship characters at all, but of course I'm aware that UST and "will they, won't they" stories are a big selling point for many a tv show for much of the audience. Still, I think the reason why some shows declined in quality wasn't really that their leading couple "got together"; on the contrary, my heretical theory is that the decline in most cases probably goes along with a scripts development that focuses on the romance of the couple too much. Take Farscape. ( Spoilers for all four seasons follow. )

Or let's take the X-Files for a counter example. Here I don't think the problem was that Chris Carter drew out the UST so long that the people stopped caring whether or not Mulder and Scully ever got together but that he couldn't plot long term conspiracy arcs to save his life and that Scully lost more and more of her life not revolving around Mulder. Moreover, if a couple, whether platonic or romantic in nature, becomes a show's selling point, we should see they these people are good for each other. I stopped watching around s5 and even then I couldn't see why Mulder was in any way good for Scully; they had in fact become both far more interesting in scenes with other people.

Now for the shows that brought couples together (and split them apart, that, too, reunited them, and everything in between) without simultanously losing quality (as always imo): Six Feet Under, for example. It's an ensemble show, but if you had to choose whom to label "leading couple", there probably would be an even split between Nate/Brenda and David/Keith; I didn't sit there with a stop watch timing screentime, but to my recollection the show treated them about evenly in terms of how important those relationships were. Brenda and Nate have sex in the pilot of the show, David and Keith are already a couple in said pilot, which echews the conventional UST/will-they-won't-they pattern entirely. Now, there were times during the five seasons of the show where I was annoyed by each of these four characters, though usually not simultanously. But I never had a problem with the place their romances had either in the overall narrative or in their personal storylines. Not coincidentally, at no point did Six Feet Under become either the Nate and Brenda or the David and Keith show.

The West Wing is a hybrid here in that one of the most popular couples, Josh and Donna, ( had a spoilery for s7 development ) The other canonical couples, though, either added sex to their relationship early on - i.e. CJ/Danny or Charlie/Zoey - or were already an established item years before the show started (i.e. Jed/Abby). (Fanon couples are incidental to the point I'm trying to make here.) Again, none of the romantic relationships ever overcrowded everything else; the various friendships (to which of course Josh/Donna also belonged) got far more room, and of course the show never forgot its central premise, that these people worked for the goverment because they genuinenly believed in the romance of public service. West Wing character X/saving the country always topped everything else. As a result, the show surely had its ups and downs, and its problems, too, but I never had the impression these were about romances (or lack of same).

In conclusion: to me, the recipe for a successful tv romance isn't how long or short the UST period between a couple is but whether or not the show in question gives the couple in question other things and relationships, or whether it expects the audience to care only about the central romance. If it does, it's bound to crash. For this viewer, at least.