Why do we watch TV shows and read books where we spend the whole time desperately wanting to beat the main characters senseless for their idiocy?

Jane Austen was good at catharsis.  She could make a reader miserably frustrated and sad and upset, and still achieve poetic justice in the end.  She could infuriate a reader, drag out the suspense, throw in agonizing twists, but it would all come out right in the end.  There were a little strings of sweetly packaged happy endings that justified all the pain it took to get there.  It might have been a little deus ex machina, but it worked.  Jane Austen wrote romance like childbirth.  (Is that a weird analogy for someone who's never experienced it to use?  It seemed apt, from what I've heard.)  [ Normal mundanity —> "Wow! Really?" Excitement —> Lots of discomfort —> happiness embodied. ]

There's this one Australian TV show, of which I have seen about twenty random episodes, which does not do catharsis well.  The frustration and suspense and frustration and agony and frustration and denial and frustration feminist idiocy just goes on and on and on...and then, two seconds after one thing is resolved, something else comes up.  'Tis unbelievably infuriating.  These characters have inhuman communication problems.  Is it humanly possible to take potentially miserably circumstances and throw every possible wrench into them to cause as much emotional wrack and ruin as one could possibly milk out of the mess, to the degree these people do?  Is there no end to what these people do to themselves?  If I were them, I would have burned something down, and keeled over and died, or at the very least punched someone in the face.  (Goodness knows there's more than a few people there who could use it.)  But it's to the point where everytime something starts going well—every time it starts playing the nice fluty Shire music—I cringe, because I can't help but be afraid that twenty minutes later it will start playing some horrific pop ballad that closes the curtains on yet another broken heart.  These people are such stuffers.  They're really awful at communication.  They're not even good at passive-aggressiveness!  There is a halfway decent catharsis every eleven or twelve episodes (all the ones I don’t see, eh).

Of course, it probably isn't all that inhuman.  I am sure there are probably hundreds of people out there who are horrific at sorting out conflict (although I'm still hard-pressed to believe anyone has as much conflict in their livers as these Australian farmers.  I mean, so much goes wrong it would be comical if it weren't so bleeding infuriating.) and who stuff all their anger and never talk and just take everybody else's word for every little thing and just wallow in misunderstandings.  And maybe I'll grow up into that kind of a world.  But one can dream, right?  One can hope for the perfect Austen romance instead of the crazy bad-desicion-nonexistent-communication black hole relationships of fictional Australian people.  A girl can dream...

And carry a big stick, too, just in case.