I was thinking about Coupling and how I might rewrite it to keep all the things that charm me about it while making the gross icky parts less gross and icky, and I realized that ninety percent of the changes would pertain to the handling of Jane and Jeff’s backstories.

Because Jane was a bisexual woman repeatedly being told that she wasn’t, was obviously suffering from depression, and was very clearly desperate for meaningful companionship (it should be noted that after bonding with Sally and Susan, and to a lesser degree the boys, she loosened her hold on Steve), and Jeff was an abuse victim whose mother had so badly twisted him that his concept of appropriate behavior was vastly skewed, and all of this was clearly dismissed by friends who, while obviously disturbed by his history, tended to write this history off as just Jeff being mad.

Both of them deserved so much better than the treatment they got, and honestly I would love to see them handled better.