The will-they-won’t-they relationship is one of the fundamental building blocks of television. Not only is it an endless source of conflict both internal and external, ranging from unrequited love to new love interests and heartrending breakups, it’s something that, when executed well, can bring tremendous life to a show. When it comes to sitcoms in particular, the will-they-won’t-they relationship adds some light serialization for longtime fans, thus increasing viewer engagement and attachment and allowing a show’s ratings to age a little more gracefully. Even if a show might be past its creative peak, a strong will-they-won’t-they relationship can keep people tuned in due to emotional investment and a need to see characters you’ve grown to care about find the happy ending that everyone is searching for.
However, will-they-won’t-they relationships can also cause narrative wheel-spinning, as television has increasingly shown itself to be fearful of a happy couple. The idea persists that putting together a will-they-won’t-they will sap a show of the inherent tension that comes with that type of relationship and remove the incentive an audience has to watch; therefore, showrunners tend to throw as many obstacles at a will-they-won’t-they as possible in order to delay the inevitable and stretch their show’s life span as much as possible.
Two such current shows are Freeform comedies Young & Hungry and Baby Daddy, both of whom are built around their respective will-they-won’t-they. As much as these shows are about young adults figuring themselves out, making mistakes both personal and professional, and emerging on the other side of a trying time in their lives, they’re also about the endless dance between tech mogul Josh (Jonathan Sadowski) and personal chef Gabi (Emily Osment), as well as lawyer Riley (Chelsea Kane) and hockey player Danny (Derek Theler). They’re two relationships that have been constructed in a different manner, one a result of a drunken hookup that turned into something much more and the other a result of years of brimming feelings and fears of destroying a beautiful friendship, yet they have one thing in common: neither are allowed to actually be together.
This past season, both couples made things official for the first time and within less than 10 episodes, both were broken up after running into problems. While Josh and Gabi dealt with commitment issues and a stint in therapy, Riley got tangled up in ex-boyfriend (and Danny’s brother) Ben’s search for romance of his own, eventually catching Danny in a lie about a high school hookup with a hateful mean girl. While breakups are a major (and important) part of any will-they-won’t-they, it was especially disappointing to see both couples go down in flames because audiences didn’t get to see them happy for very long. You have to see will-they-won’t-they couples together to make the obstacles they go through worth it and just as with any other element in a television show, if there’s no payoff in sight, it makes the obstacles encountered less substantial and lessens the engagement the audience has with the narrative. Consistently being drubbed over the head with narrative dead ends becomes frustrating and feels less like the organic obstacles that arise from complicated romance and more like the audience is being strung along while a show racks up as many episodes as they can before their hand is forced.
Part of this is exacerbated by the fact that Young & Hungry and Baby Daddy are cable comedies and don’t have as much room to move as, say, Friends did when it was trying to balance Ross & Rachel with the other stories it was attempting to tell. Narratives have to be more compressed with lesser episode orders and it can be understandably difficult to service a full ensemble while keeping serialized arcs alive over the course of 10 episodes. However, part of what Ross and Rachel so special (at least early on) was that you were able to see how they were as a couple and know what exactly you were rooting for, which thereby gave more weight to the bumps they hit along the way. You knew how their dynamic when they were together changed the dynamic of their peer group; you knew where the issues they faced stemmed from and watched as they grew and evolved out of them. Had they not been able to have that time of peace, where you saw how their dynamic changed once things became official and how they complemented each other during this change in their relationship, the love the audience had for them would have dissipated much earlier than it did. What problems they encountered would’ve went from devastating and achingly realistic to a set of contrivances that only existed because it was time for them to breakup.
Which is how both Young & Hungry and Baby Daddy feel right now, as both breakups were less than satisfying in their motivation and execution. A good TV breakup can be exhilarating and produce some fertile ground for a show to explore, but Josh and Gabi’s, for example, was the latest in a series of roadblocks meant to keep them from interacting on a romantic basis. In a vacuum, Josh’s realization that his mother’s way of dealing with men had negatively impacted the way he looks at relationships is a perfectly legitimate piece of character development; however, it was undone by a soapy kiss between Josh and his therapist, capping off three seasons that’ve seen engagements, trips abroad, new girlfriends, new boyfriends, food trucks, hot brothers, and Gabi quitting her job multiple times, among the countless ways the show has tried to keep its central twosome apart. Had some of these been punctuated with periods where Josh and Gabi could feel out their connection and attempt to figure out how they work as a couple, it wouldn’t feel as overwhelming as it does, but Young & Hungry has become a show solely about conflict with little to no payoff. It’s especially egregious (and honestly, exhausting) considering that the show has been working backwards from the beginning, as the hookup between the two occurred in the pilot, so Young & Hungry has had to reach deep into its toolbox in order to provide 41 episodes of near misses, miscommunication, and plot-induced amnesia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjNQk5QSyfg
On the other hand, Baby Daddy waited around 70 episodes to bring Riley and Danny together for the first time. It was a definite slow play that featured a lot of exploration of his longtime crush on her, her obliviousness to and gradual acceptance of his feelings, and the relationship with Ben that kept popping back up at inopportune times. Yet rather than leaving the two to themselves and figuring out how Riley going from one brother to another would impact their group dynamic, the show didn’t give Danny and Riley many opportunities to prove their narrative worth, as they had less than a handful of storylines to themselves before the finishing blow was delivered in the spring finale. And it wasn’t as if the lack of screentime was caused by tension between them or something unresolved that reared its ugly head in a Hamptons beach house; the cause of the breakup (a hookup Danny had in high school) felt egregiously flimsy, given that it was centered on a new character (Sam, Ben’s potential love interest), the suddenness it was introduced into the narrative, and how much time Riley devoted to fixing Ben up vs. spending time with Danny in their new context. The motivation behind Riley’s actions makes sense, given that she feels guilty for how things ended with Ben and for moving on with Danny, but to throw her back at her ex after finally summoning up the nerve to put her together with Danny showed just how reticent Baby Daddy was to write for a couple we all know is going to end up together in the end.
Which is not to say that either show should pander to the audience or write specifically with certain fans in mind. No show benefits from writing like that and however frustrating a creator’s vision might be, it’s preferable to allowing the inmates to run the asylum and fans to dictate the creative direction of a show. It’s just that both Baby Daddy and Young & Hungry are in a strange predicament, in that they’re so focused on their romantic entanglements that they haven’t really developed their ensemble as much as they could yet because they’re so focused on their romantic entanglements, they don’t have the space to devote to their ensemble. Each show has spent so much time on the different permutations of their central couples that deprioritizing them, even for a limited time, isn’t feasible, which forces both Young & Hungry and Baby Daddy to pile on further complications and contrivances in order to extend the dramatic reaches of their couples. Typically, will-they-won’t-theys are overarching storylines that come into focus whenever the show needs a jolt of energy; for example, Ross and Rachel weren’t the focus of every, or even most, episodes of Friends, nor did they (always) wholly consume the episodes in which they were the central focus. That show made sure that every member of the ensemble could carry an A-story and that there was just as much focus on the platonic goings-on in that peer group as there was on the romantic complications. This helped keep Ross and Rachel as a dynamic fresher for longer than it would’ve been had the show been cobbled together around his unrequited love for her and her realization that she had feelings for him, too.
With Young & Hungry and Baby Daddy, though, they’ve exhausted the narrative juice that comes with a will-they-won’t-they pairing due to how much screen time the angsty journey toward coupledom has received. And they don’t really have the capability of shuffling those particular storylines to the backburner for, say, a full season due to logistical concerns (Josh and Gabi work together, Danny and Riley live across from one another) and underutilized supporting characters that don’t have as much experience with A-stories. Which is a shame, since both Young & Hungry and Baby Daddy are good shows with a lot of heart that’ve started to crumble under the weight of their circular narrative. Too concerned with keeping the status quo for as long as possible, they’ve become unrewarding watches that are marking time until their series finales, shows whose narrative wheel-spinning has overshadowed the positive things each brings to the table. Granted, they’re light, fun comedies and shouldn’t have to operate under the same expectations as more layered dramas, but we’re at a point of diminishing returns where something has to change and the way it’s looking now, I don’t think anything ever will.
The fourth season of Young & Hungry is set to premiere Wednesday, June 1st at 8:00 on Freeform, with the fifth season of Baby Daddy to resume at 8:30.
