When I was a lad, a story spanned 4 or even 6 episodes so had time to evolve properly, and of course gave the famous cliffhangers at the end of each episode. Th

When I was a lad, a story spanned 4 or even 6 episodes so had time to evolve properly, and of course gave the famous cliffhangers at the end of each episode. This mechanism worked really well, even if the writing was often iffy. The modern scheme of parcelling an entire story in a single extended episode, otoh, hardly ever works, because there just isn't time for the viewer to get invested in what's going on. The New Year's day one, for example, seemed to be entirely resolved in about 10 minutes, which was just flat.