Noel: Well, you've tapped one of them, which is the prolificacy thing. You said that networks need a lot of episodes of certain shows to keep viewers tuning in on a week-in, week-out basis—not to mention needing to reach a certain threshold in order to make money off the syndication rights—and to a large extent, that addiction to certain characters and storylines is what distinguishes television from other media.
Television as a medium can be used lots of ways, but lately, the debate seems to boil down to two opposing perspectives: should TV be telling long, involved stories with lots of character development, or should it just show us the characters we love in individual playlets that only offer the illusion of change? Consider one of the more divisive recent Lost episodes, "Tricia Tanaka Is Dead." (No real spoilers here, by the way, for those of you who catch up with Lost on DVD… and more on that phenomenon in a moment.) To those who've been watching Lost because they're interested in following its long, involved narrative, "Tricia Tanaka Is Dead" was a wasted hour, in which nothing significant happened. "They spent the whole episode trying to start a car," I heard more than one friend grumble. But to those who enjoy spending time with Lost's characters, "Tricia Tanaka Is Dead" was one of the best episodes of the season so far, bringing a lot of people who hadn't spent much time together this year into the same space, and letting them (and us) just enjoy the company. (Of course, there's another group of Lost fans, who fervently believe that even a literally wheel-spinning episode like "Tricia Tanaka Is Dead" will one day make sense in the larger scheme of the show. I sympathize with those dudes, but I think their hopes may be too high.)
The problem with the old model—the "spending time with characters you like" model—is that, as you point out, TV fans increasingly don't watch shows in the old weekly way. I still do, by and large, because I read a lot of TV blogs, and I hate to be too far behind the action. I record my favorite shows, but I rarely wait more than a day—or even an hour—to watch them. But I've also had the experience of watching shows like The Shield, Gilmore Girls, and Battlestar Galactica via DVD sets and cable-network marathons, then making the shift to weekly viewing once I got caught up, and I can see the difference between watching a bunch of episodes in a big chunk, when everything seems to fit together fairly well, and watching them once a week, where a stiff, go-nowhere episode can feel like the beginning of the end.
The only comparable dilemma I can think of in any other medium is in comics, where fans increasingly prefer to wait for the trade collections on series they enjoy, rather than buying six or eight issues over the course of a year. Of course, if everyone waits for the trade, the series gets cancelled, and no trade ever gets produced. (Oops.) And some of us still like the feeling of walking into a comics shop and walking out with a stack of floppies, even if they cost way too much—and clutter up the house way too much—for the 15 minutes of entertainment they're going to provide.
That's kind of how I am with television, too. As much as the critic in me wishes that more shows were tightly plotted with an endpoint in mind—like the "novel on film" ideal that the medium rarely comes close to reaching—I confess that I also head into any given evening just looking for something to watch. Which also appears to be the case for the vast majority of TV watchers, who've made miss-a-week-it-doesn't-matter procedural shows and reality shows the real ratings champs of the past decade, even as critics have been championing serials.
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