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I feel like this is generally an issue with miniseries. There's this relentless need to take the half of the show that's about an interesting topic (Mindhunter particularly galling for this) and then wedge it against the protagonist's personal relationship issues, especially if it's a period piece with period vibes for the main concept and yet the protagonist is living their personal problems through 2020 norms and cultural memes. I understand the actual core stuff is what costs money and is hard to write, but the amount of shows where it has to be wild pingponging between 'here is the thing the show is about' and 'here is his girlfriend feeling neglected' is ridiculous.
The Mr and Mrs Smith show on Amazon was guilty of this and I stopped watching at three episodes in. They squandered an interesting setup on what felt like the writers rehashing all the most awkward parts of their own failed relationships.
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I think it's a problem with period pieces in general. Robert Eggers's work (The Vvitch, The Northman) is one of the few examples I can think of where someone in mass media attempted to have the characters' concerns match what people of that period's actual concerns would have been. And while I'm not sure what Eggers's feelings about religion are, I can tell from his films that he actually gets religious people, something that makes him better than 99% of people in tv and film. The hardcore Puritans in The Vvitch and the norse pagans in The Northman make sense on their own terms, which actually makes them more relatable to me in a strange way even if I find several of the specifics of their beliefs repugnant.
I get the sense that this is something that's beyond the grasp of so many writers and self-described media-literate critics, particularly in the mainstream in the past decade or so. They seem to perceive everything at surface level, that a character is relatable if they share all the surface-level characteristics of the viewer, who they imagine to be some version of themselves. So they have the right skin colors, ages, sexualities, and political beliefs, but the characters themselves are flat and uninteresting.
Because what viewers relate to aren't such surface-level characteristics. And it's not even the so-called shared experiences of people who suffer due to sharing these surface-level characteristics that idpol likes to push as a real thing that exists so much; even these things are ultimately surface-level. To build a relatable character requires giving them something underneath all that that the viewer can connect with, something deeper and more personal than just having the right skin color and fighting for the right causes. And once you have that, the surface-level stuff largely don't matter, hence why something like a Puritanical colonial New England family in The Vvitch can be relatable to a modern person.
I imagine this is a predictable consequence of being taught that race/sex/etc.-essentialism was not only correct, but that it was the only correct and just way of looking at other humans all throughout their schooling. When your time and energy is spent focused on these surface-level features, then that doesn't leave much room to focus on the stuff underneath that actually matters. Writers write what they know, after all.
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