The original post: /r/television by /u/DigiQuip on 2026-04-10 11:23:02+00:00.
This is starting to become a pet peeve of mine in TV today where the protagonists constantly find themselves in situations where things only get spiral downward. Even if they do score a win, that win comes at a heavy cost, often times making things worse. A “one step forward, two steps back” kind of thing.
Often times this gets compounded with ridiculous interpersonal drama or, and I hate this the most, “I lied to protect you!” decision making trope that rarely has support from the plot to justify that decision, see Supernatural.
These spirals of misery just keep layering and it gets exhausting to watch. I want my heroes to be heroes. I want my bad guys to be bad guys. And I want my heroes to beat the bad guys. Adding a ton of complicated baggage and moral ambiguity to protagonist’s motivations isn’t “deep” at all. It’s actually kind of lazy writing at this point. Failures aren’t a plot twist attempts to subvert the protagonist’s success in ways the audience doesn’t expect go too far and as a result are obvious.
This isn’t to say these things shouldn’t happen at all, but they shouldn‘t become the core plot device that moves a show along.
And criticisms of this can be seen as far back as Lost. Most recently though I found this in The Boys and Invincible.