Writing long arcs is no real assurance of good storytelling - the commercial virtue of it is to keep people hanging on, not to satisfy them. So it can be as good as Mad Men or just garden-variety Days Of Our Lives stuff. As Joss Whedon said today - on a slightly different subject, but it still applies, "The more we make things granular and less complete, the more it becomes lifestyle instead of experience. It becomes ambient. It loses its power, and we lose something with it. We lose our understanding of narrative. Which is what we come to television for. We come to see the resolve."
