Why are there audiences for hopeless stories?

I watched the first two seasons of the Italian television series Inspector Ricciardi on PBS Passport and was engaged by the interesting characters, the Naples setting, and the insights into 1930s fascist Italy. 

Luigi Riccardi has a supernatural ability: he sees the ghosts and hears the last words of murder victims. It aids his investigations but torments his soul. Terrified of passing on what he considers a curse, Ricciardi doesn’t want to marry and have children. But he’s enamored of a young woman whose kitchen window faces his bedroom window, and the feelings are mutual. For the first season and a half, they stare longingly at one another. They finally declare their love, and Season 2 ends happily. 

Passport hasn’t picked up the third season yet, but I Googled and found out that Ricciardi and Enrica marry and she dies giving birth to their child. I won’t watch season 3.

The reason for Enrica’s death, I read, is to keep Ricciardi in character. He’s a melancholy man and cannot escape his curse. 

Inspector Ricciardi strikes me as crueler than most stories because Ricciardi, a good man, bravely defied his curse and sought happiness. Viewers like me cheered him on. I didn’t expect the rug to be pulled out from under him — or us.

Why are there audiences for such devastating stories? Who likes to watch them? 

Some people say that grim stories are cathartic. Fictional trauma allows audiences to release pent-up negative emotions without actual risk. When I really like fictional characters, however, they feel real to me. Their suffering doesn’t relieve me any more than a friend’s would.

Some people say that grim stores are more realistic than upbeat ones. Whether more bad or good happens in life is debatable, but certainly there is joy as well as sorrow, laughter as well as tears, hope as well as despair. I’m not looking for saccharine plots. I want stories where people face their troubles and emerge stronger, stories where change is possible, where no one is as hopeless and doomed as Inspector Ricciardi is.

Depressing storytelling has bothered me for a long time. Back in the late 1990s, I started a website, positivelygoodreads.com, recommending upbeat literary novels. “I'm not looking for novels without moral dilemmas, loss, struggle, and conflict," I wrote then. “I’m looking for novels that leave me feeling that there's reason to go on living.” Some feedback said I was being pollyannaish; upbeat fiction isn’t true to life. But there also have been emails from people who say they too want to read novels that uplift and inspire them. 

My favorite series on PBS, Call the Midwife and All Creatures Great and Small, have more substance than anything I watch, and both are unfailingly warm and upbeat. Serious issues like poverty, death, interpersonal tensions, physical and mental illness, violence and war are not avoided — indeed, issues of the times supply the plotlines — but at the end of each episode I feel hopeful about humanity. TV critic Moira Macdonald wrote of All Creatures Great and Small, “I needed this show, a beautifully filmed series that celebrates loving kindness, community and the importance of bravely carrying on.”

All Creatures Great and Small and Call the Midwife have been among the most loved series by PBS viewers for many seasons, so I’m not alone in wanting hopefulness in what I see and read. What’s your preference?