Cage Fighting!

What is behind this obsession contemporary crappy TV drama has with cage fighting?

Last year on ABC's All My Children, the supremely annoying Ryan Lavery participated in a "fight club" to work through his "personal demons." What was Ryan so upset about? He was questioning if he could be a good parent since his own father was not. (Side Note: Ryan's wife, Greenlee, was artificially inseminated with sperm Ryan had donated to a fertility clinic many years ago when he first came (!) to Pine Valley. I'll end this here as it could go on for quite some time.)

For example, and one that I find extremely funny, Ryan's father would often make a sandwich for Ryan's younger brother Jonathan; after Jonathan had finished his sandwich, Mr. Lavery would tell Jonathan that the sandwich was poisoned. Apparently Mr. Lavery played this trick repeatedly, so Jonathan is also, like his brother, an idiot. Jonathan, stop eating the damn sandwiches! Who could blame Mr. Lavery for playing such pranks? Look who his sons are! But I digress from the topic at hand.

More recently, on Fox's The OC, the superficially dark and moody Ryan Atwood (not to be confused with Ryan Lavery) was also involved in cage fighting as a means to work through his "personal demons," after his long-time, on-again/off-again, friend/girlfriend Marissa Cooper (played by an animatronics robot) was de-activated in a car crash at the end of last season.Was Ryan responsible? No. Although Marissa was a passenger in Ryan's old-school Toyota 4x4, the sinister surfer Volchok and his van ran TV's least favorite couple off the road and into a maudlin montage. Of course, Ryan could have stepped on the brakes and let Volchok pass, but that would have been too sensible.

As a result, Ryan moves out of the Cohen's pool house and into a bar, where he also obtains employment, despite the fact he's only 18 years old (although in real life Benjamin Mackenzie is just shy of collecting Social Security). Out in back, the bar owner conducts cage fights for the betting man. Ryan, being mildly retarded, participates in the cage fights yet refuses to take payment. He is beaten regularly--literally and figuratively--as he doesn't put up much of a fight, until his male lover, Seth Cohen, convinces Ryan to stop this stupid story arc.

Again, what is behind this current obsession with or tendency to use cage fighting as a means of coping? Natalie, Tootie, Blair, and Jo from The Facts of Life never worked through their "personal demons" by joining a fight club, although that would have been the best episode ever.