Having watched Season 1 and most of Season 2 of Dawson's Creek, and having read the episode synopses for the remaining 4 seasons, one of the things which really struck me is that a drama — written like Dawson's Creek — is fundamentally cruel. The same people need to be fodder for drama all the time, and so they must be constantly tormented. Everything given must eventually be taken back, and it often is before long.
This is the fundamental weakness of television — it can't tell love stories. Television doesn't end, so it can't have a "happily ever after"; it must go on, and it must be entertaining.
I think that dramatic series are fundamentally stronger when something good is permitted to last. I occasionally think that television is largely written by sadists who can't stand there to be anything good. It's very difficult to find a television show with an arc which isn't all about destruction. (Another thing which television suffers from is that actors often move on, making television character's lives even more unstable.)
The exception, I think, are comedies. The Nanny was about a romance between Miss Fine and Mr Sheffeild; eventually they were married. There are, surely, other examples of this, though they don't come to mind at the moment. The reason, if I'm correct about this trend, is that comedies get their primary material from the small things, whereas drama takes its main material from the big things. Thus comedies can have happy characters, whereas dramas are always mean to their characters.