I’d like to suggest that culture is a (virtual) organism that thrives in a state of homeodynamic equilibrium; such that the backstory and thematic engines of Gilligan’s Island fit neatly into its title song yet build a foundation for LOST. The narrative simplicity of commercial, appointment, broadcast television provided everyone involved in those productions with certain significant advantages.
Fringe is a strikingly engaging attempt to find that elusive, roundly/widely satisfying and effective balance between LOST and Gilligan. Like Dollhouse, Fringe is about something fascinating; the systemic and systematic devaluation of being human, redemption from technological dementia, generational alienation, the relationship between means and ends…and both first seasons were also remarkably entertaining.

@Scott: Not surprising, given your generation’s rabid individualism.

b) As regards the topic of the post: there’s a serious disconnect between you and us, sir. We grew up on the sixty minute episode: our brains have fully incorporated every reasonable plot twist that you can cram into the forty minutes of actual content. Movies (which cost ten dollars until they are uploaded by someone in production) are barely better than long television shows these days in terms of story to time.

Take a look at the games industry: their massive struggle these days is not with coding or making fun and playable games but coming up with the story lines that distinguish between franchises of otherwise identical shmups. For further examples in the same vein, look at the buck-wild success of the MMORPG genre – the only genre where players author their own narrative and the game companies supply only the framework for interpersonal interaction (see EVE for a particularly great implementation of this mechanic: they let players do what the hell ever players feel like, so long as players obey game meta-rules).

We hunger for story. Big, bad, epic Lord of the Rings-style story (a blockbuster trilogy of epic plot scale). Many of us download whole seasons at once or watch episode by episode online. When you boil the ads out, the forty minute segments begin to build to a narrative harmony (albeit one that echoes over hour-long periods, rather than bars or stanzas). We ache to sink our minds into something that challenges us, that directly questions the behaviour of our leaders (see BSG and the prisoner treatment theme). We love stories like the Wire or Heroes, where characters move into intimacy with viewers, and we understand their struggles at a soul level.

So, Mr. McCraken, I have a proposal for *you*. Keep your entertainment. Enjoy those spare fifteen minutes of mind control and consumerist boosterism. We’ll take Lost, the Wire, all however many seasons of Heroes there are now. We’ll take Frisky Dingo, which season-by-season doesn’t take more than three hours but will tax the greatest stitcher-of-narratives you know. We demand *challenge* from our entertainment, not pills of complacency.