Also, it used to be that an hour show was about 50 minutes long (with 10⁺/_- minutes of commercials). Now, an hour show is slightly more than 40 minutes.

You can't get away from the commercials.
--
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together

Dear Wife really loved the first several episodes of Lost and said she would sit through them again if I would watch them with her to catch up, so we could watch the remainder together.

I tried, but I couldn't do it. It was kind of amusing for a few hours, but finally I said, "So it's X files, only without Scully and Mulder, or humor, or topicality, or genuine weirdness, or good acting, or complex moral agents like Inspector Skinner, or classic trademarks like the flashlight scenes?" And Dear Wife responded.  "Exactly.  But they don't make X-files any more, so shut up."

I stopped watching after about five episodes, but she hung on for a while longer. Eventually she too gave up on it. "Enough is enough, already."

I really did like the episode where the very heavy guy (whose name I forget) has all the trouble with the lottery number. That was pretty much up to X-files standards. But so many of the other episodes had the feel of X-files, only "dumbed down." If you take a show like that, an ersatz X-files, and remove wit, what are you left with? Scooby-Doo, I guess. On an island. Or maybe Beverly Hills 90210, on an island.

[Aside: Sudden insight department: maybe the circumstance that I do in fact live on an island takes away some of the exotic appeal of the show to mainlanders? True, Martha's Vineyard isn't exactly the Lost island. But its physical boundaries are always in evidence, and it's a simple fact of life for us islanders that sometimes you can't get off the rock. In the winter, especialy, the boats are fewer and stop running earlier in the day. And if a bad storm comes up, you ain't getting off, even if you own your own boat or airplane.. .]

X-files of course grew bloated with all kinds of plot about aliens and government and Mulder's sister and Scully's impregnation. But the cool thing, it seems to me, was that those plot threads were there for narrative logic, to impel Mulder along, but they were only as essential to the whole idea as the song is to an inspired jazz improvisation. Jazz is all about the riffing off the basic seed idea; it's not about the seed idea itself.

OK I think I've belabored this much point much more than enough.
... this is dreamworld after all... it isn't? Shit.