‘Shipbaiting,’ Like Ted Lasso’s Ted and Rebecca, Is a Bad Idea

[TMC]

https://popculturereferences.com/shi...is-a-bad-idea/

Brian explains why shipbaiting, like the creators of Ted Lasso did with Ted and Rebecca is a bad idea (as it really all baiting, honestly).



Today, I explain why “Shipbaiting” is a bad idea.

This is the Cronin Theory of Pop Culture, a collection of positions I’ve collected over the years that I think hold pretty true.

The concept of “shipping” in pop culture fandom is such a curious phenomenon since, well, it has been there since the very first TV show that involved single people getting together with another, and it has LONG been part of pretty much ALL fandoms, but it is only in the last couple of decades that people have made a point of sort of singling out the concept as “Shipping.” If there is a possible romance on a show, you WILL ship a specific couple. That’s the POINT of these things. Take Jim and Pam on The Office, one of the most famous TV couples of all-time. You’re obviously SUPPOSED to be “shipping” them on the show. That’s the POINT OF THE SHOW. Basically 90% of the people watching the show wanted Jim and Pam to get together (maybe more than 90%), but most people who watched The Office likely didn’t THINK of themselves as “shippers.” And that’s fine, but, well, they were. Shipping is just a central part of any sort of TV series that involves romance.

Okay, with that established as a given (that everyone who watches TV shows that involve romance “ships” somebody on the shows), let’s go to shipbaiting.

It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like, which is that it is when a show intentionally misleads you into thinking a ship is a possibility, when it is not.

And I think it is a bad idea.

TV shows are going to have love triangles, that’s always going to happen. TV shows are going to have possible ships that don’t work out. That’s always going to happen. That’s fine. No harm, no foul.

But KNOWING that a ship will NEVER happen, and then misleading your audience into thinking that the ship actually might happen? That’s not cool.

It goes back to one of my earliest Cronin Theories of Pop Culture, which is that you shouldn’t be competing with your audience over plot developments (as a sort of corollary to that theory, I also believe that doing unexpected things JUST BECAUSE THEY’RE UNEXPECTED is a bad idea, as well). TV writing shouldn’t be an adversarial process with your audience. Write what you want, and hopefully the audience will like it or not.

I have no problem with the idea of the Ted Lasso creators deciding that it would be interesting to spotlight Ted and Rebecca (the coach and owner on the hit Apple+ TV series, Ted Lasso) as a platonic male/female friendship between two single peers instead of a romantic relationship. As the show’s co-creator and writer (and the actor for Coach Beard), Brennan Hunt noted, “We have been taught by years and years of television that when there is a male lead and a female lead they end up together. That can be hard conditioning to see past.”

And that’s FINE. It’s FINE to say, “There aren’t enough platonic relationships between single male/female lead characters on TV,” and then implement that. However, the show then made a point to often HINT at a ROMANTIC relationship between Ted and Rebecca. Hunt admitted as much in the same Reddit AMA that the above quote is from, where he noted that they wrote in at least two scenes specifically in response to fans who were shipping Ted and Rebecca together, to tease the idea of them getting together, while knowing that they weren’t.

By doing it the way that they did, they were intentionally playing INTO the tropes that they said they wanted to avoid because it was too common of a trope. You can’t say “Why can’t male and female leads just be platonic?” and ALSO specifically write plots to set them up as ROMANTIC, it’s a cheat. You either write them as platonic if that’s what you want to do, or you write them as romantic, you don’t tease the romance plot just to mess with fans. It’s adversarial (even if done “affectionately”) when you shouldn’t have an arrangement like that with your fans. You control the narrative, you are not “winning” anything by faking viewers out.

Going adversarial with TROLLS is a whole other story, but that’s a whole lot different than loyal fans who just shipped Ted and Rebecca together, fans who might not been fine with them NOT being romantic if the show didn’t intentionally try to play INTO the shipping as a tease.

Queerbaiting (teasing a non-heteronormative romantic relationship without any plans of having it actually happen), of course, is all of this and even WORSE, but I think by now, most people are on board with agreeing that queerbaiting is bad, but I think pretty much ANY baiting of non troll fans is a bad thing for TV creators to do.

(When I Googled this to see if anyone else had written about this topic, Reddit user apareciums had mentioned something on this exact point on the Ted Lasso subreddit. Just wanted to cite them, even though I came up with my thoughts on this topic independently. They made an additional point that I didn’t even consider, which is that most of Ted and Rebecca’s Season 3 scenes together were romance fakeouts, which is essentially the exact opposite of saying that you wanted to spotlight their friendship).