It’s because of this that I’ve stopped watching shows like Pretty Little Liars, Awkward, and Faking It. They just look like macabre performance art to me. All of the actresses are so good looking: Their lips plumped, eyelashes extended, bodies toned, hair always perfectly blown out and curled. Then, we’re supposed to believe they have time for all of this impulsivity-cum-DRAMA on top of the five hours a day they appear to spend getting dressed? I’m tired just thinking about their morning routines, let alone all of the social media networks they then have to monitor while doing homework, trying to get into college, hooking up with various people (including teachers), and — in the case of PLL — constantly running away from a murderer. Their lives are just too complicated for me and the scripts feel so forced because they’re clearly written by twenty- and thirty-something writers trying to recapture that carefree, teenage mindset. It looks so maudlin and performative through my 30-year-old eyes. And yes, I know Pretty Little Liars is jumping ahead five years this season. My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is still closer to reality.Just because I’ve forsaken many of my past pop culture loves as I entered my third decade, however, doesn’t mean old habits die hard. I still love romantic comedies, especially ones where two people engage in a beautiful dance of “will they/won’t they” before they do. So help me, I will always love them, Whitney Houston-style . For example, I watch The Holiday every single time it’s on TV, just to see what I refer to as “the Jude Law money shot,” a.k.a. the scene where Jude Law’s character Graham shows up drunk on Amanda’s (Cameron Diaz) doorstep, looking so fucking handsome that my teen self who entertained every fantasy ever about dating a British author/editor just dies and goes to heaven.Now that I’m 30, though, I stop after the money shot. Because if I keep watching, I start raging about how Iris (Kate Winslet) gets stuck with Miles (Jack Black). Nothing against Jack Black, but if we’re going to pair up Cameron Diaz and peak-of-hotness Jude Law, I think there’s a better match out there for Kate Winslet. Ugh, the trope of pairing gorgeous women with schlubby men — will it ever end, Hollywood? I also start fretting over how Cameron Diaz and Jude Law’s characters can possibly sustain their relationship, what with her being a successful movie trailer editor in Los Angeles and him being a father of two adorable young girls in England. Surely, someone will have to relocate and that's going to be a whole discussion.What was really starting to piss me off about the romantic comedies I grew up loving, though, was the lack of characters’ inner lives. Everything was surface-level, even sweeping declarations of love and affection. If someone was sad, it was a frowny face kind of sad, not the kind of depression or desolation that I now know can send you to your bed for whole weekends or ruin an entire summer.That, coincidentally, started to change during my 30th year, thanks to the rise of a TV genre that Vulture calls “ sad-coms .” These shows — examples of which include You’re the Worst, Billy & Billie, Catastrophe, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and BoJack Horseman — portray people and relationships a lot more accurately. Yes, even BoJack Horseman, an animated series about a world where half of the characters are animals that stand upright and act like humans, manages to capture the exquisite, torturous mix of levity and loneliness that is the human existence in a way I relate to on every level.Here's some more pop culture I'm extremely grateful for in my 30th year: Shows like You’re the Worst, UnREAL, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend all have female main characters who deal with mental illness, but it doesn’t define them. We’ve seen mental illness on TV in the past, sure, but it’s usually portrayed with the broadest of strokes and relegated to the killers on shows like Criminal Minds. Mental illness isn’t just a paranoid schizophrenic who can be used for a compelling whodunnit. (Oh, and also, the person with paranoid schizophrenia is a person, not a disease.) In 2015, the stigma and stereotyping finally stopped on some shows.