"Scandal." "The Walking Dead." "The Good Wife." "Mad Men." "Downton Abbey." "House of Cards."
Pick a TV show and it's likely one or more of the main characters have either had or have narrowly averted extramarital affairs.
And affairs as a plot device is wearing thin quickly, says Huffington Post's Matthew Jacobs.
"We're asked to commit to a show whose very premise folds right out from underneath it. If the solution were just 'he'll leave his wife, they'll live happily ever after,' we wouldn't have a television program," Jacobs wrote. "When this many popular TV dramas revolve around a singular subject it becomes a trope, and an exhausting one at that."
The latest example of this is Showtime's "The Affair," which tells the story of a married man who meets another woman while on vacation with his family. Creator Sarah Treem told Reuters in the midst of the show's first season that she wanted to tell the story of an affair from all sides, and that she didn't feel that was something television would have explored that situation "until recently."
Perhaps "recently" is significant. If more of TV's most popular shows deal largely with infidelity, do they do so because their audiences can relate? While it's hard to nail down infidelity rates (because people lie or don't want to admit they've been cheated on), the UK Daily Mail reported this year that surveys conducted in both the UK and the U.S. put the infidelity rate somewhere between 25 to 70 percent for women and 40 to 80 percent of men.
While Teem and the cast of "The Affair" speculated in an "Entertainment Tonight" segment that the prevalence of infidelity on TV is a reflection of real life, Dr. Phil said on the program that TV glamorizes what it means to have an affair.
"Television makes everything look sexy and glamorous, that's just what it does," Dr. Phil said. "You can't assign (extramarital affairs) to television. People do that, they make the choice, they have to own it."
Email: chjohnson@deseretnews.com
Twitter: ChandraMJohnson
You may also be interested in the following stories:
What Taylor Swift's latest music video teaches us about jealousy
This new video game shows that there is more to war than guns and head shots