The Insta-Couple Plague
You know what is really sad? I've done several columns on cliches and writing shortcuts many soaps are doing, and I still have many other similar shortcuts to criticize. Where does it end?
This week, it is those instant couples. You all know what I'm talking about. The couple that the producers and writers put together before the couple is on screen. Very, very rarely, do those couples ever really hit it off or ever really gain a strong following. In fact, the only thing usually guaranteed by such couples is that they will last far longer then they should, leaving the viewers screaming for mercy.
The list in the last three years alone is astounding. OLTL's list includes Bo and Melanie. GH's list includes Roy and Melissa. PC had Eve and Ian telegraphed from the moment she returned from her honeymoon. GL saddled Reva with Noah. Y&R couldn't have been more obvious when Alex arrived for Malcolm. Days' Belle and Shawn-D were telegraphed from day one and Eric and Nicole were a planned pair. ATWT has a huge list of recent insta-couples like every woman Ben and Isaac have dated.
Of the relative few of many instant couples on that list, do you honestly like more then two? Three? Dare I ask all of them? Granted, some are better written then others, but for the most part, the obvious and forced way that these couples come together usually turns off viewers before the story even begins. Very few of these couples survive; in fact most are usually abandoned at some point. There is a reason for this, it is very, very, bad writing. On top of that, it doesn't take into account the importance of chemistry. Take for example Days' Bo and Hope. When Bo and Hope met any savvy soap watcher could tell there was a direction the show might go in, but they had chemistry, the writing was built up over time, the storyline was natural. None of that was taken into consideration when they took Hope away from Bo and kept putting her in disgusting situations with John, with whom she had no chemistry with. Writers then scrambled to make it credible after the jungle virus story didn't pan out well. So fake history between John and a Hope look alike crippled the show for three painful years.
Sometimes it is solely a problem of lack of chemistry (i.e. Alex/Malcolm) but is more often than not a problem of writing. People just showing up with "so and so's love interest" stamped on their foreheads immediately get viewers jaded and then silly stories that keep putting the pair together just make it even worse. Even worse than those are the instant couples made out of long-term characters. Probably the most infamous and destructive pairing was Days' Shane and Kayla, which came out of nowhere and the show had to desperately try to back track itself out of later. Y&R's Victoria/Neil flirtation blew up in their faces for more reasons then the surprisingly racist and backward views of fans, most notably zero chemistry and poor buildup. These kind of pairings ignore previous history and reasons why a pairing would be unlikely or stretch the realities of even a soap.
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