Back when I used to travel for business I would watch the tv sometimes in the hotel. I just watched the ads, because they had the high production value. While a 30-minute (really 22 minutes) show might cost $3MM an episode, a 30 second ad could easily cost a million to make. And in that 30 seconds was a perfect short story: a crisis, a bit of character development, then a resolution and a denouement. I could watch a bunch of them, usually about products I’d never seen before, and skip the crappy show.