UST and Shipping in Television

*Originally published on 10/6/09



It's pretty common practice in television to give the lead character a love interest. Some times it will be a guest star (recurring or otherwise) but other times it can be another regular cast member, usually the opposite lead. Once in a while, the supporting characters will develop a budding romance, but it's usually the leads.

The usual practice with this is to have the two be good friends. This leads to the possibility for several cute moments where you see how close they are. They then get tangled up with the trope dubbed UST, or Unresolved Sexual Tension. Things usually escalate until finally, a romance develops.

I say finally because there are always complications that keep them apart. It makes sense from a writing perspective, complications create conflict and thus add some element of drama. The problem lies in the fact that they draw it out so much.

A prime example would be The X-Files. Throughout a vast majority of the show, Mulder and Scully are very close friends. They're about as close as two people can get without any romantic involvement. They rely on each other and are there for each other through thick and thin. This led to a lot of fans engaging in what is referred to as "shipping', that is to say that they imagined that those two would make a good couple and should get together.

It's not always fan driven, but eventually the two characters get together. By the time they do, the couple loses some of it's allure.

It happened in The X-Files, and it happened in Frasier with Niles and Daphne, two supporting characters. They spent so long teasing and shipping the two characters that when you do finally see them get together, it doesn't seem right.

Almost every show seems to make this mistake. I know, logic dictates that you want to see the characters get together, but usually by the time the writers get to the actual romance, viewers have almost lost interest. It's one of the downsides of Bones. It's in it's fifth season and they are still shipping the two leads. I can tell right now that they're making the same mistake Chris Carter made with Mulder and Scully.

This even happens in cartoons. The Teen Titans animated show did this with Robin and Starfire. To be fair, those two actually were an item in the comic so it stays true to the source material in that sense, but they only get together in the post script movie. It wasn't bad, but you watch it and just go "meh".

It's a thin line to walk. You can't have the characters get together too early, but stringing it along doesn't help either. More often than not in those situations, it turns out the two characters work out better as friends than as a bona fide couple.