Romance & The Endurance Plot

Re-post from Votaries.

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This post originally started out as commentary on Friends. However, it has morphed into a critique of a certain type of plot.

Friends is extremely well-written, not just per episode but per season. The writers pace the big events very well; they aren't as crowded or as spread out as I had remembered.

For one, I never realized how long the duck and the chick were Joey and Chandler's pets!

So Friends is good. But eventually I get exasperated with the romantic relationships.

Not so with Frasier.

The writing (in terms of jokes/lines) is equally good on both shows; the difference lies in an underlying approach: Friends is a show about people who endure. Frasier is a show about people who create their own destinies.

In Friends, everything that happens, happens TO the characters, even when they are the cause of those things. Ross's divorces are things that happen to him. Rachel having a baby is something that happens to her. Rachel and Ross getting married in Las Vegas is something that happens to them. It isn't so much that they are victims; rather, they are constantly at the mercy of LIFE.

Now, this isn't exactly a falsehood. Things do happen to us that we simply have to handle. Despite Ayn Rand's remarkably silly assertions in Anthem, we do not single-handedly create our own societies on a day-to-day basis. We are communal animals and part of being a communal animal is endurance. Say I get into a car accident--I fill out the paperwork, get a new car with another loan, and keep working, etc. I follow the requirements of my society. I don't go live in a tree somewhere.

Unfortunately, this "endurance plot" is the only truth Friends knows.

In Frasier, Niles leaves his wife (of two days) to be with Daphne. By any ethical standard, this is a really rotten thing to do. But it never bothers me the same way Ross and Rachel bother me because Niles is fully aware of what he is doing. He makes the decision and bears the consequences. There is never any suggestion that this is something that just happened to him, oops, guess he has to live through it.

Frasier is filled with people who may not make decisions I would make or even agree with but who MAKE decisions as they create individual lives for themselves.

Friends is about people who never really seem to get this.

Lately, it seems like this "endurance plot" has become rather ubiquitous. Without naming certain popular teenage series...it seems like the heroes and heroines are all reactive. Things happen to them, and they bear up. They bear up well, magnificently, endearingly.

But nobody actually gets on with things. I like romances and mysteries where characters do something. The something can be minor, personal, local. But the somethings matter at the minor, personal, and local level. And I care about these somethings because characters I care about make them happen.