My fourth year in college I watched the OC religiously.  At first I chalked it off to stupid primetime soap and condescendingly made fun of Ryan for watching it and for his roommates for all getting together on Wednesday nights to watch it.  Then I saw one episode and got hooked.  Upon coming to Boston, I kept up with the second season.  It couldn’t be missed.  I let down friends with whom I played IM basketball in order to watch the OC.  Even when they really needed more bodies to field a team for a game, I stood my ground, said no, and stayed home in front of my TV.

Then the show really got stupid.  Think about it … they only have so many characters.  The stories all revolve around those same characters.  They can only date each other so many times before the writers run out of combinations of couples.  That’s when they start making up stupid stuff like a girl’s ex-boyfriend dating her mom.  Yeah, like that actually happens.  It just gets lame.

So recently, I’ve been watching Grey’s Anatomy like crazy.  Granted, it is a better written show than something about a bunch of rich, privileged teenagers in Southern California… BUT, I’m halfway through the third season, and I’m getting a sense of the same problem that brought the OC down.  They’re running out of stories, and in particular, juicy stories about who’s dating who.  So they start making stuff up that’s totally ridiculous.

That got me thinking to another show that never seemed ridiculous: Sex and the City.  How did they do it?  How did they not run out of stories?  Borrowing from that success, I think the key is for the show to revolve around a handful of key characters who have stable relationships with each other (like a girlfriend bond that will never break).  Then you write the show about their volatile relationships with OTHER people.  That way, you can always have new other people on the show, and nothing gets stale.

If I ever write a pilot, I’ll write about something like that, instead of revolving my story around a core group of 10 people getting in and out of relationships with each other.