Multiple Story TV Show Episodes

I was thinking recently about some things that I had written about both in this blog and in a discussion post at some point in the past. That is that with some shows that I have been watching recently there seems to be more than one story going on in each episode tying all the episodes of a season together, which in turn makes it hard to start watching a series half way through a season because so much is unexplained to you. Some of the examples that I can think of are the Syfy series Eureka and one of the channel's newest series Stargate Universe (SGU). I also was able to catch a bit of the new USA series White Collar which seems to be heading in the direction of a continuous story link throughout the season. Now when I am talking about a story that runs throughout all the episodes of a season I don't mean something as simple as in the series Monk where they occasionally mention his wife and how Monk is after the one particular guy, but more of an in-depth story line. Like in SGU there seems to be something that one of the main characters is hiding, as if he has some ulterior motive that has not been revealed yet, but somewhat hinted at. As for the new USA series it would seem that the main character that is the criminal/FBI consultant has some ulterior motive for being out of jail and from what was hinted at in the first episode that he is searching for someone.

The reason that I am going on and on about these type of story lines is because I started to think that all of the series that I have mentioned are full hour series. Now most of you can probably remember back to a time when there were very few series that actually had hour long episodes and that most TV shows were merely a half hour. I started thinking that an explanation for the storyline that bridges all the episodes of a series could be a way to keep the viewers' attention for that extra half an hour. I mean I remember watching shows like Everybody Loves Raymond with my family, and those episodes only lasted for half an hour, but in my opinion could have been extended to a full hour because of the comedy that ensued in most of the episodes. Now another reason may be that the extra story within the episode is merely filler to help extend the episode to a full hour. Now of course I am not fully sure on any of this and it is all just a hypothesis, but in a way when I think about it, it tends to make sense. The only thing is we really wouldn't know unless the writers, producers, developers, etc. let us in on why they are adding in the extra story line. So to wrap this up I am just curious about what you guys out there think about this and wonder if you have and guesses as to why that extra bit of story has been added into television shows.