We just love the same old story, let it play again and again

You know how it goes. The protagonist is living a life of settled routine when a horrifying alien force begins to intrude. The force is unstoppable, destroying their relationships and realigning their priorities without heed for their desires. For a moment it seems they might escape, but in the end they are defeated. Yes, that’s right: it’s a romantic comedy.

Genres are slippery things, and yet they seem inescapable. Even Shakespeare was primarily a writer of remakes. His King Lear and Macbeth were based on Hollinshed’s Chronicles; his Romeo and Juliet was based on a poem by Arthur Brooke; his Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra cribbed liberally from Plutarch. Even his Hamlet revised the mysterious “ur-hamlet”, probably performed in 1587.

Now data scientists at the University of Birmingham have confirmed that there is nothing new under the Hollywood sun. By feeding 6,147 scripts into a languageprocessing algorithm, they mapped every film on to six basic plot structures. The best-grossing films have “man in a hole” stories, in which the protagonist suffers a big fall and then a big rise. The worst-grossing are “riches to rags”, showing a tragic decline, which are most popular with critics but make an estimated $3 million less. The most enjoyed by audiences were simple “rags to riches” films: things start bad, then get better.

You may feel this research is crude and mechanical, that it misses the point – but I don’t think so. For all that we fret about spoilers, occasionally succumbing to a puritanical obsession with experiencing films and TV with “fresh eyes”, we are far happier with a formula than we sometimes admit.

Take the American medical drama House MD, starring Hugh Laurie. Every episode follows an identical pattern. First we meet the patient, who gets sick in the middle of a child’s birthday party. We cut to Dr House engaged in a petty dispute with his colleagues. The patient has a secret sin and won’t confess; House subjects them to increasingly undignified procedures and orders his assistants to break into their home; a diagnostic error almost causes death; finally, the truth is revealed and the patient goes home with their self-image in tatters. In 2008, this was the most-watched television show in the world.

The fun comes from anticipated pleasure; from knowing what’s about to happen, but not knowing how. Elizabethan audiences knew when they walked in whether the play would end with everyone dead or married. It was, and is, variations within these structures – the suspension, modification, reversal and roundabout fulfilment of traditions – which provide interest. There can be no deviation without something from which to deviate.

That’s not to say nobody likes experimentation. Media that defies convention can still be successful, like the oppressive void of Waiting for Godot or the protean romance/comedy/horror of Being John Malkovich, of Shakespeare-blended genres too, giving Antony and Cleopatra a kind of marriage by uniting them in the grave and the protagonists of Measure for Measure a kind of tragedy by marrying them to people they hate.

But it does not take a computational narratologist to see how often we are creatures of habit. Ask any normal person about the clichés of their favourite media and they will be able to describe them blow by blow, and their eyes will light up. We rarely tire of the same old story. We only ask that it plays with us a little.