The Nanny is on US Hulu right now, and I watched the pilot for what I’m pretty sure was the first time. From the second Fran tells Maxwell, “I know you…Esquire magazine, New York’s ten most eligible widowers?”1 you can feel a connection between them. I genuinely don’t know how they kept these two mostly apart for six seasons without it feeling incredibly contrived.2
As you might expect, this got me thinking about how co-stars sizzle, or fizzle, onscreen.
Chemistry’s a weird thing; Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had a notorious off-and-on-again romance for more than a decade. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, they play two people who have fallen out of love but who still aren’t quite through with one another. Their chemistry is palpable, sizzling. In Cleopatra, early in that infamous love affair, they’re two dead fish. What’s the secret sauce? Damned if I know.3
Rolling with good chemistry can be key to a show’s success: Parks and Recreation had planned on Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope continuing to have doomed romances for most, if not all, of the show’s run. Then came Adam Scott.
Scott’s buttoned-down, slightly dorky, but still passionate Ben Wyatt made a perfect foil to Leslie, and better yet, Scott and Poehler looked like they belonged together.
Classic-format TV shows like The Nanny and Parks and Recreation have a little more latitude than movies to test and tweak chemistry, even if they don’t strike gold right away. Abbott Elementary’s Greg and Janine didn’t burn the screen down in their first appearance, but their easy, comfortable relationship was easy to build on and create a convincing friends-to-lovers romance. Cheers could build up Sam and Diane, let them boil over, and then find a new co-star for Ted Danson when Shelley Long moved on (though Kirstie Alley’s Rebecca ended up chasing rich guys instead).4 Friends’ cast was strong enough for there to be multiple onscreen relationships (Lisa Kudrow and Matt LeBlanc claimed they wanted to reveal their characters had had a long-running affair in the finale, but the producers wouldn’t let them).
Heated Rivalry was one of the unexpected success stories of 2025, hitting like a comet in November and putting its stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie on magazine covers and in major ad campaigns at lightning speed. (Storrie has even snagged an Emmy nomination for his turn on Saturday Night Live.) Showrunner and creator Jacob Tierney had an eight-episode order: he didn’t have time to build up tension the way an older show could. Instead, he cast Williams and had him read with his top contenders. Tierney later told Out: “Hudson told me, ‘The other guy was good, but Connor felt like he was going to pin me down and fuck me.'” Hard to argue with that.
Of course, chemistry is great when you want it to spark a romance, and a bit inconvenient when you don’t. Rumor had it at the time that Mutant Enemy scaled down on scenes between Riley and Willow and Anya and Giles when those pairings had a better onscreen spark than their canonical love interests. The off-the-charts spark between Twin Peaks’ Audrey Horne and Agent Dale Cooper was kneecapped by behind-the-scenes drama.5 And then there’s the phenomenon in some long-running action shows where the men have longer-running relationships and better chemistry than the female love interests of the week. (In western fandom, that normally gets called “slash,” thanks to the zines that paired up Star Trek’s Kirk and Spock, designated with “K/S.”)
Who are your favorite small screen couples? What about the couples that never were? Tell me all about them in the comments.
About the writer
Bridgett Taylor
Bridgett Taylor has a day job, but would rather talk about comic books. She lives in small-town Vermont (she has met Bernie; she has not met Noah Kahan), where she ushers at local theatrical productions and talks too much at Town Meeting.
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Two furry friends solve a crime.
How a low-budget show went halfway around the world. Sort of.
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A father, son, and talented performer who will be Giles to a generation.
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A brief career that made a blockbuster impact.
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(“I resist this blatant attempt to get my AO3 name,” she said, only half-jokingly.)
Cooper and Audrey are certainly high up on my list of never-was couples–agreed that it’s better that it didn’t happen, though, at least in the original run of the show. But I would have loved it if they’d gotten together in S3. Also, Buffy and Faith should have gotten to hook up at least once (and ideally much more than once).
Barney/Robin on How I Met Your Mother remains the most baffling case of a show catching lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry, rightly deciding to run with it, and then torpedoing it anyway in the service of the pre-written ending, which may make it one of the most damaging cases of “this is not the chemistry we intended” behind-the-scenes meddling of all time. I’m still confused by everything involved in those writing decisions. You convinced me Ted and Robin wouldn’t work out, show, and I believed you!
The scene with the kids wasn’t even that cute! (I liked whoever said it would have been a good joke to have those actors at their end-of-show ages, having aged that much while Ted told the story.)
I do remember there were stretches of The Nanny where the keeping them apart felt somewhat contrived, but even then you could chalk up most of it to Mr. Sheffield being a weenie.
The show also put together a believable secondary romance late in the show, turning Niles and C.C.’s constant bickering into a slap-slap-kiss arc.
My favorite behind-the-scenes story from The Nanny was that Daniel Davis, who played Niles, got fan letters telling him he should coach Charles Shaughnessy (Maxwell) on his British accent. Shaughnessy is British. Davis is from Arkansas.
Okay, that accent bit is making me laugh.
I looked that up, because I really enjoyed C.C. and was hoping they’d give her some depth. I’m very curious to watch how that relationship develops.
Shades of Higgins on my beloved Magnum, P.I.!
Fresh off Frssier, I would say that the chemistry between Kelsey Grammer and Laura Linney in a total of six episodes is absolutely amazing. Which doesn’t mean we needed or wanted a show built around them, only that someone realized the only way you could end Frasier was to have lightning in a bottle after years of chemistry that wasn’t ever entirely right. (The connection between Grammer and Bebe Neuwirth was a thing of beauty but pitched perfectly, at least on Frasier, to make you get why they were together and why that was a mistake.)
Of course, the best chemistry on Frasier was between David Hyde-Pierce and Jane Leeves. But that is something we take for granted.
I think that was probably the plan they had for Parks and Rec, actually! (Yeah, Frasier and Lilith were meant to burn bright and hot.)
David Hyde Pierce has chemistry with everyone, I swear.
On other shows… I was thinking of non-chemistry couples in shows I watched, and since you mentioned Parks, I never felt much about the Ann-Chris relationship. It almost felt like they were only together for, well, the reasons in Party Down Lydia said she wanted Henry and Casey to get together: “They both have brown hair. And they could wear each other’s jeans.” (That relationship sure did have chemistry, though. Hey, someone else Adam Scott had chemistry with.) And in terms of organic developments, I really quite did like the April-Andy relationship, not least of which because it’s so unexpected, but on another level makes complete sense.
Another one I really didn’t feel: Troy and Britta on Community. Like I felt zero spark between them when they were on screen. Really felt like the writers were just running out of ideas. Or they came up with a relationship that made sense on paper but didn’t work in practice.
I am sure I have other examples of both good and bad chemistry I will want to mention. The only thing I can think of right now though is how NewsRadio hilariously dispensed the will-they-won’t-they between Dave and Lisa and had them sleep together in the second episode. (And, I might as well add, they had the chemistry to make this believable.) Then the show got the tension and comedy out of them trying to keep their relationship a secret, or the conflicts of them both being too type-A and competitive to really make it work long term.
Troy and Abed had such beautiful chemistry any other relationships (romantic or otherwise) had a pretty steep uphill climb, and Troy/Britta did not have the juice, for sure.
There are a few relationships where they just had the couple hook up early and went from there – Homicide did it with Michelle Forbes and Reed Diamond, where eventually they worked their way up to an actual date. I think you can make that work really well in the right circumstances.
Oh, yeah, and probably true that Dale Cooper shouldn’t have gotten involved with a high school girl, although the chemistry was in fact on fire, and in real life it makes sense (Fenn was 25 and McLachlan 31 when season 1 aired).
I rewatched that scene some years back where she shows up in his bed and they’re just…goddamn.
I think character-wise, it gives Coop a chance to stand out in a cast of men who ask too much of the women and girls around them (not that he’s perfect, but hoo boy what a town he’s in).
Year of the Month update!
And for August, send us your pieces on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 2001!
TBD: James Williams: Millennium Actress
Aug. 2nd: Tristan J. Nankervis: Ocean’s Eleven
Aug. 7th: Gillian Nelson: Recess: School’s Out!
Aug. 14th: Gillian Nelson: The Princess Diaries
Aug. 16th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Mulholland Drive
Aug. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Disney’s California Adventure
Aug. 27th: Cori Domschot: The Mummy Returns
Aug. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Walt Disney Treasures
And there’s still time to write about any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1979.
Jul. 24th: Gillian Nelson: Don Bluth
Jul. 28th: John Bruni: All That Jazz
Jul. 29th: Lauren James: Ghost Story
Jul. 31st: Gillian Nelson: Big Thunder Mountain
“Scott’s buttoned-down, slightly dorky, but still passionate Ben Wyatt made a perfect foil to Leslie, and better yet, Scott and Poehler looked like they belonged together.”
This is astute — I think Poehler and Scott had good chemistry together but there’s something slightly unbalanced here. It’s more prominent in 30 Rock, with Tina Fey and James Mardsen — they are very good together but Mardsen is fitting in around Fey, whose whole deal as Liz is that she has chemistry with no one. Poehler and Scott feel right as a couple but are always talking a bigger game than playing it. To continue with 30 Rock, Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore always seemed ready to go, in part because they were both embracing the cartoonish aspects of their characters and leaning into that intensity.
How am I the first person to mention Mulder and Scully? Perhaps weirder, how am I the first person to mention Xena and Gabrielle, since I don’t even like that show?