Amusingly, TV trying to warp into hollywood is more, in my perception, a sign of hollywood failing, as opposed to TV succumbing to the same fate. TV was incredible and still is incredible at what it used to do, telling short stories connected by general series and characters, while assembling a loose overarching narrative for the people watching all of it. Most seasons only had 2-3 eps of 20+ focused on the season wide arc, one or two setups and one or two conclusion episodes at the season end. The rest was mostly interchangeable, and could be consumed at the viewers convenience, which was essential for reruns. Today, it still holds value as being a low commitment way to engage with any particular series, you can usually just jump in and the core story starts and stops in that ep. You might not know every character well, but essential elements were always played out.
But now hollywood refugees have grabbed the nearest media they could shift off to, and are warping it into a twisted replica of what they used to have. TV is giving up its strengths and adopting the weakness of hollywood by turning episodes and seasons into one long, running, overproduced, extremely precise production where the whole season is one singular story, and the episode storyline is itself often a secondary afterthought. You're seeing them try and apply movie tricks like foreshadowing and subtext to events that are legitimately hours apart for the viewer, and wondering why its hard to follow. Your seeing seasons shorten out and reduce the episode count to try and solve this and the production costs associated with making every episode at the level of a movie, and now you've got 4-6 episode seasons that drop every four years. At this point, Television is just an uncut movie where the director wasn't told "no" to extraneous stuff. Its no longer suitable junk food media, its not longer reasonable to pick up one episode and watch just that, its now mandatory to watch it all in exact order to understand anything that's going on, and its doubling down on that layer of stupid.
