Somewhere around my third or fourth viewing of this series, while I was still trying to figure out what the hell went wrong with such great stuff, I realized that I was staying for the romances, both the romantic couplings (and tripling) and the romance of the ensemble. I stayed because I loved the characters and I wanted to see them come together (not a double entendre). So I looked closer at the four love stories in the series and at the building of the ensemble. Ensemble later; let’s talk about how amazingly good the love stories in this series are. I used the four basic steps of building a love story (a vast simplification of a vastly complex human emotional arc) as a rubric for this post. This is entirely arbitrary and should not be interpreted as The Only Way To Structure A Love Story. It is, however, a pretty good approach for arcing a relationship. Continue reading →