When TV Writers Run Out of Ideas, They Light a Fire

Television has a problem, and it’s literally combustible.

Shows keep using fire as a narrative shortcut—a dramatic reset button that resolves character conflicts faster than any actual storytelling could. A Slate critic calls this the“cop-out fire,”and after watching Hulu’s Alice and Steve, they’re done letting writers get away with it. The show, created by a writer from the British series Sex Education, starts with genuine tension: Alice and Steve are lifelong best friends in their 50s whose relationship implodes when Steve begins dating Izzy, Alice’s 26-year-old daughter. The premise has teeth. The potential for messy, complicated drama is there. But instead of earning a resolution, the season finale uses a knocked-over candle to start a manor house fire that magically reconciles all parties in the final ten minutes. Izzy and Alice stop fighting. Alice forgives Steve. Crisis solved. Everyone’s suddenly grateful to be alive.

The problem is Alice and Steve isn’t alone. This trope is everywhere. Yellowjackets torched a cabin in Season 2. Stranger Things burned down a mall in Season 3. Desperate Housewives went the house-fire route back in Season 2. Game of Thrones, despite having actual fire-breathing dragons, still felt like it was grasping for narrative solutions by the finale. The pattern is clear: when a writer doesn’t know how to untangle their plot, they light something on fire and call it climactic.

But fires don’t have to be lazy. They can work—if writers follow four basic rules. First, the fire needs dramatic logic. In Better Call Saul, Chuck McGill’s death by fire makes sense because the character is in mental crisis, confined to his house, and already established as using gas lanterns due to his electricity phobia. The fire doesn’t feel random; it feels inevitable. Second, don’t put the fire at the very end unless you’re operating at Jane Eyre levels of confidence in your entire narrative. Third, seed the thematic possibility of fire throughout your story. Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere earned its climactic blaze because it had been building metaphors about fire and purification from the start. Fourth—and most critically—the fire should create new problems, not solve existing ones. This Is Us gets it right: the entire series unpacks the consequences of a single fire, making the event a genesis point rather than a reset button.

Alice and Steve fails on nearly every count. The fire comes at the worst moment—the finale—and it lands like the writer suddenly remembered they needed to wrap things up. Worse, you can see it coming. That’s not suspense. That’s poor craftsmanship. The show never wrestles with the genuinely creepy fact that Steve has known Izzy since infancy. The relationship between Alice and Izzy, which should have been the emotional core, never gets real development. When the fire arrives, it feels less like destiny and more like desperation.

Here’s what frustrates viewers most: we came for three hours of messy human conflict. We wanted to see how these characters might actually work through real problems. Instead, we got an elemental get-out-of-jail-free card. The critic nails it: this is cheating. Fire is a tool. When used thoughtfully, it can unlock something profound about a story. When used lazily, it just feels like a writer hit“panic”and reached for matches.