Thursday Movie Picks (TV Edition): Love Triangles (Romance Tropes Edition)

 

For the eighth week of 2021 as part of Wandering Through the Shelves' Thursday Movie Picks. We go into the fourth and final week of the Romance Tropes Edition in TV love triangles as there’s always something going on where this guy is in love with one woman but he’s also in love another. Then there’s a girl who is in love with this guy but he’s in love with someone else. Such chaos as here are my three picks:

1. Cheers-Sam Malone/Diane Chambers/Rebecca Howe

The place where everybody knows your name is probably one of the greatest show ever made as it is set largely in a bar where everyone talks and drinks while just needing a place to relax. Running the bar is the former baseball player Sam Malone who hires Diane Chambers whose fiancée left her as she works at the bar for a few seasons and is then replaced by Rebecca Howe whom Malone tries to woo after his on-off relationship with Chambers falls apart. Diane would come back every now and then yet Sam’s true love is the bar. Plus, any sensible man would choose the sophisticated Diane over the neurotic Rebecca. What dumbass would choose a whacko in Kirstie Alley over someone as fun and entertaining as Shelley Long?

2. Beverly Hills, 90210-Brenda Walsh/Dylan McKay/Kelly Taylor

Aaron Spelling’s creation that spawned a bunch of love triangles in the show yet the most memorable during the third-fourth season involved Brenda, Dylan, and Kelly all because Brenda was sent to France with Donna Martin to take a break from Dylan following their little tryst in Mexico. Dylan spends the summer with Brenda’s friend Kelly and later on, things get crazy and into college as it was just weird. Kelly then later dated Brenda’s twin brother Brandon and Brenda was gone. If you were a teenager in the 90s, I’m sure there’s a good percentage of people that watched this show as this was a guilty pleasure for me. The last season that saw Jason Priestley leave the show as Brandon and brought the late, great Luke Perry return as Dylan was terrible as I just gave up on the show after that and didn’t bother watching the new version nor its recent revival.

3. That 70s Show-Steven Hyde/Jackie Burkhardt/Michael Kelso

The sitcom set in the late 1970s is probably one of the best except for its last season as two of its principle characters were gone from the show. The first four seasons explored not just these six kids spending their time at a basement but also relationships as it played mainly into the one between Eric Foreman and Donna Pinciotti. Then there’s Jackie and Kelso where they had this on-off relationship for four years but ended all because of Kelso constantly cheating on her and being stupid and Jackie often putting him down. After returning from California with Eric and Donna, Kelso tried to get back with Jackie but she had begun a secret relationship with the more rebellious Hyde as that was a relationship that had more substance and showed more complex sides to both of them. The fact that the eighth and final season ended Jackie and Hyde’s relationship and a brief tease of her getting back with Kelso was just terrible as she ended up with the lame foreigner Fez.

© thevoid99 2021