TV’s Background Tension: Where Suspension Meets Disbelief
My wife and I recently finished watching the re-edited fourth season of Arrested Development (‘Fateful Consequences’) on Netflix. I’d mostly given up on the show back in 2013 when the first version of the fourth season was released, and though the re-edit helps clarify the story and make it feel more like the show I knew, it’s nowhere near as funny, engaging, and snappy as Arrested’s three original seasons. We’ve gotten about an episode and a half into the brand-new fifth season and our prospects of finishing are dim.
Talking about what we don’t like in the newer seasons got me thinking about what I liked in the old ones. I started to compare and contrast them in my head and any time it’s come up in conversation I’ve found myself returning to the idea that the end of the third season of Arrested Development was as satisfying a finale as the story could have ever hoped to have. They wrapped the whole thing up and put a nice bow on top — no need to find a weird new box to cram it into.
Why do some TV finales work and some don’t? How can some shows last ten or more seasons while others can barely make it past two before wearing out their welcome? There are a ton of different factors, of course, but the one that’s caught my attention is what I’ll call (for lack of a better term) the show’s background tension.
For much of its history, televised fiction was built to be endlessly episodic. It was assumed that stories and characters that could repeat and recycle themselves with little to no permanent change could maintain their appeal much longer and thus remain profitable for the studios and networks that produced them. Every episode of Cheers took place entirely within the same bar with mostly the same characters. It lasted 11 years (an epoch given its absurdly narrow scope) and became one of the most successful and beloved shows of all time. The Simpsons is about to head into its 30th (!) season precisely because no one on the show ever ages. Even as the contemporary world rolls forward around them, the residents of Springfield remain locked in the same jobs, schools, and life phases forever (this could only be achieved by an animated show, since on-screen flesh and blood actors would obviously have aged far beyond what any audience would accept). The most popular soap operas ran for literally thousands of episodes because no character, relationship, or place was ever too sacred to not be turned on its head over and over, resulting in narratives so staggeringly complex that they melded into a fog of grey nonsense. The continued atmosphere of drama was more important than any one story.
There’s business merit to this approach, sure, but it also speaks to the unique psychology of television: it is innately intimate. These characters exist in your home and their lives are played out on the wall of your living room. The time you spend with them is the time when you’re at your most relaxed, with your guard let fully down. Cheers was so popular because its creators understood that watching a TV show was and could be nothing more than the comfort of hanging out with your friends — going “where everybody knows your name.” The self-aware character Abed on Community describes TV as “a friend you’ve known so well, and for so long, you just let it be with you.” This hang-out format worked extremely well before the rise of streaming services (or even the popularity of full-season DVD sets in the early 2000s), when every show was a short weekly appointment to be kept. But as we all know, things have changed.
We live in the era of on-demand streaming, binge-watching and, thus, serialized storytelling. Watching multiple episodes of Cheers in a row might feel like a relaxing hang-out at first, but the longer it goes on the more a contemporary viewer can start to lose interest. ‘Nothing’s changing!’ we think, ‘there’s no real story!’ Our ability to suspend disbelief has some limits, and the more TV we have access to, the more we seem to want longer, less-episodic stories that can hold our interest and keep us suspending our disbelief over extended viewings. Writers have to inch their stories closer to the pace of real life, where most problems don’t resolve in neat, 20 minute chunks. That meta-conflict — the place where reality meets fantasy, where suspension meets disbelief both in front of and behind the camera — is what I’m calling background tension.
Background tension often manifests as a moment of ‘real world’ dynamics intruding into the world of TV to bring a potentially never-ending story to a close. It’s almost always presented as the in-show reason the story can no longer continue, even if the show is actually ending for real-life, behind-the-scenes reasons. It’s the writers’ admission that a story (or even a loose premise of one) stops being believable if it truly goes on forever, affirming the disbelief we’ve been suspending while further humanizing the characters we’ve grown to love by giving them this dose of life in the real world. The more specific, resonant, and tied to the action the background tension is, the more satisfying the whole arc of the show, especially the finale, can be.
So I listed out a handful of shows whose arcs and finales I could remember, double-checked on Wikipedia, and then filled in the following:
- PROTAGONIST: the main character
- CHARACTER ARC: what the protagonist wants, does, and experiences
- BACKGROUND TENSION: the thing that would or could keep the story from continuing indefinitely; or how the world judges and ultimately decides what happens to the protagonist (with the show’s deeper thematic questions in parentheses)
- FINALE: the end of the story and the answer to the thematic questions posed by the background tension
- ANALYSIS: how well the background tension does or doesn’t inform the show’s conclusion
Obviously, spoilers ahead…

30 ROCK (2006–2013)
- PROTAGONIST: Liz Lemon, late 30s TV show runner
- CHARACTER ARC: Liz struggles to balance her demanding job with her chaotic personal life under the mentorship of her boss, Jack.
- BACKGROUND TENSION: Her show, TGS, is critically and commercially unsuccessful and could be cancelled at any time, removing the characters from the titular setting. (Is all of Liz’s effort actually fruitful? Is it possible to keep work and life balanced, to “have it all?”)
- FINALE: Liz gets married and adopts two children, thereby completing her own family just as TGS is cancelled and her coworkers go their separate ways. She finds a better balance working on a new, less demanding show while her husband stays home with the kids.
- ANALYSIS: Throughout the show’s run, TGS is threatened with cancellation several times, and many of the running gags hinge on the audience understanding that it’s not supposed to be a very good or popular show. Liz’s journey toward family and balance, however long and protracted, is also constantly at the forefront of the narrative. Weaving these together to wrap up the show feels natural, satisfying, and earned.

SEINFELD (1989–1998)
- PROTAGONIST: Jerry Seinfeld, 30-something stand up comedian
- CHARACTER ARC: Jerry navigates odd situations and the foibles of life in 1990s New York with his three friends, George, Elaine, and Kramer.
- BACKGROUND TENSION: The implicit selfishness and immaturity of its characters can’t sustain happy, functional lives forever. (Can you live this way and not face deeper consequences? Do these lives have any meaning?)
- FINALE: After surviving a plane crash and unwittingly committing a crime of non-intervention, the four are arrested, tried, and sentenced to prison time as punishment for their selfishness.
- ANALYSIS: This show’s background tension only becomes apparent through the lens of the finale. The detached, neurotic behavior patterns of the characters are rarely addressed on an episode-to-episode basis. That’s kind of the whole point of the show (it’s “about nothing” — the darker side of the hang-out format). The idea that they suddenly get some long-deserved comeuppance while continuing to learn nothing and refuse to change is thematically in line with the rest of the show, but because there’s almost no narrative foundation for it, it comes out of left field and satisfies neither the impulse toward morality and justice nor the underlying current of nihilism. It’s difficult to swallow and feels strangely preachy from both sides.

COMMUNITY (2009–2015)
- PROTAGONIST: Jeff Winger, 30-something disbarred lawyer turned community college student
- CHARACTER ARC: Jeff bonds with a group of misfits he would have once disdained or ignored, learning to love and be loved by them.
- BACKGROUND TENSION: College is a special, insulated world with the built-in expiration date of graduation, so eventually Jeff will have to leave and re-enter the real world. (Can he be as ruthless and successful as he was before or will he be fundamentally changed? How does experiencing love shift an ambitious person’s goals?)
- FINALE: After graduating, trying, and failing to re-enter the real world as a different, more altruistic kind of lawyer, Jeff becomes a teacher at Greendale and eventually comes to terms with his friends moving on and growing up. He’s been changed and it’s now his job to help change others.
- ANALYSIS: Once he becomes a teacher in the last two seasons, the show lays Jeff’s anxiety about never leaving Greendale on much thicker (along with his other neuroses related to age and alcoholism), but the seeds were planted at the very beginning. Troy, to Jeff, early in season one: “You should try accepting where you’re at, man. Take a pottery class or something!” Jeff’s uneasy peace with his place in the world may not be as joyous and wholistic as most comedies, but it fittingly signals growth: the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.

LOST (2004–2010)
- PROTAGONIST: Jack Shephard, late 30s spinal surgeon who, along with an ensemble cast of survivors, crashes on a mysterious island
- CHARACTER ARC: Jack attempts to get the survivors rescued while investigating the island’s strange characteristics and inhabitants.
- BACKGROUND TENSION: The argument between staying on and getting off the island, embodied in various characters throughout the show and ultimately made explicit by Jacob and the Man in Black, can’t be sustained indefinitely, especially given the urgency the show places on it. (Is the island a good or bad place? Something to be cherished or escaped?)
- FINALE: After escaping the island and finding his old life miserable, Jack returns to the island and becomes its official protector, dying shortly afterward and leaving the job to Hurley. The complicated flash-sideways timeline ultimately argues for the island’s goodness, prizing the connections and relationships among the survivors.
- ANALYSIS: The whole presentation of the show was built on mystery and the slow revelation of information and backstory. Viewers believed they would be given one final, twisted puzzle piece that would bring the whole thing together and make sense of it. That the finale ended up pivoting toward the show’s broadest themes — good and evil, science and faith, destiny and free will — felt like a cop-out to many, even though these were heavily present all along.

THE WEST WING (1999–2006)
- PROTAGONIST: the senior staff of the White House under President Josiah Bartlet
- CHARACTER ARC: The president and staff attempt to govern fairly and righteously while navigating the pitfalls of politics, bureaucracy, and the complex modern world.
- BACKGROUND TENSION: Presidential terms are limited so, eventually, the administration will have to end and be replaced, either by allies or enemies, and history will judge what the staff has done. (Will they have accomplished any actual good? Will their work be continued by fellow Democrats or be undone by Republicans?)
- FINALE: A new Democratic president is elected, some of the staff continue to work at the White House while others move on, and Bartlet retires feeling his legacy is secure.
- ANALYSIS: There’s a structural inevitability baked into the show’s premise, so the focus of the ending necessarily shifts to what comes next for the White House and, thus, the country. The election of a young, virile Democratic president (as well as a Democratic majority in Congress) allows the outgoing administration and the audience to view the finale through the most rose-colored glasses possible, even if the cynicism of party politics remains deep under the surface. The show stays true to itself in the commingling of wish fulfillment and civic reality.

HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER (2005–2014)
- PROTAGONIST: Ted Mosby, late-20s architect living in New York with his group of closest friends
- CHARACTER ARC: An older/narrator version of Ted recounts the story of his search for an ideal companion and of navigating personal and professional adventures with the gang.
- BACKGROUND TENSION: The flashback premise paints the show into a corner: we know Ted will eventually find the mate he’s seeking and it’s simply a matter of when and how, which deflates any possible background tension. (As Ted’s children occasionally ask: does this story have a point? Is it worth telling?)
- FINALE: Older/narrator Ted reveals to the audience that the mother is dead and his children encourage him to reconnect with Robin, which he does.
- ANALYSIS: The finale reads as a bait-and-switch, turning a story that appeared to be “worth telling” simply for its complexity, variety, and humor (a meandering hang-out show with a dangling premise) into an unsatisfying one-who-got-away story. The longer the show went on, the more obvious it became to viewers that the mother was likely absent or dead, not because of any in-show clues, but because stretching a twist-less story out this long would cross the line from suspension to disbelief. In order to keep watching you have to believe there’s a vital piece of information you don’t yet have. In the end, you see it coming and it’s still a disappointment.

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT (2003–2006, 2013-pres.)
- PROTAGONIST: Michael Bluth, late 30s housing developer
- CHARACTER ARC: Michael struggles to keep his dysfunctional family and business together after his father is arrested and the family loses all its money.
- BACKGROUND TENSION: George Sr. may be guilty of treason and other serious crimes, a question that sets the plot in motion and must eventually be answered. By extension, the family exists in a state of judicial limbo that can’t last forever. (Did they actually earn/deserve their privileged old lives or should they be punished and left to fend for themselves?)
- FINALE (season 3): George Sr. is revealed to be mostly innocent, having been set up by the C.I.A. while also acting as a puppet for the real criminal mastermind, his wife Lucille. Michael leaves the family to their consequences.
- ANALYSIS: In its first three seasons, the show created space to explore a variety of situations, themes, and smaller arcs by using the implicit slowness and complexity of the legal system to mock itself. Revealing in the season three finale that the entire plot was set in motion by bureaucratic bumblings outside the family’s control not only reenforces the theme of institutional stupidity, but neatly closes the loop on everything that’s transpired. The final episode’s structure and title, “Development Arrested,” is yet another wink and nod to this. All secrets have been revealed (George Michael and Maeby’s attraction, Lindsay being adopted, Annyong’s true identity, etc.) and all charges dropped, so even though the family is implicitly facing similar troubles from Lucille’s arrest, a chapter has been firmly closed. The newer seasons lack the cohesive background tension that drove the first three, so we’re left with a big, silly cast of characters who go ricocheting off each other for no apparent reason and to no apparent end.
…Looking at these different themes and finale’s, it seems to me that the best background tensions arise from limited settings that (surprise, surprise) match the length of an average show: college, a presidential administration, a white-collar criminal investigation, or, indeed, producing a TV show. These are especially effective when they’re interwoven with the distinct life phases of the characters so that ending can be the same thing as growing. They feel comforting in a circle-of-life way. Open-ended mysteries that start wide and drill down closer and closer to a single answer don’t fare as well, and pure abyssal stagnation fares even worse.
What this says to me is that as our narrative needs have evolved from self-contained half hours toward years-long arcs, our emotional needs have become more apparent. We still want TV shows to feel like hanging out with our friends but, just like in our own lives, we need real growth and lasting change to feel truly human.