It does seem sometimes that the audience -at least in places I’ve been- forgets the importance of character and focuses only on the plot. Like when people complain that the shows are redundant and predictable. It’s true, in every episode of House, there’s a disease for him to diagnose, and even the solution comes at just about the same moment in every episode. Except there’s more to the story than that. There’s the story of House himself and to a lesser extent the other characters. I would say with any good episodic show, and any show in general, has the story of its characters and their development.

This is totally a tangent and not really your point, but that right there exemplifies my problem with serialized shows… at least, with most serialized shows made in the US. A serialized show SHOULD be finite, because it’s supposedly telling a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. The problem is that in fact most serialized shows aren’t really, in the sense that if they are popular, the expectation is for the story to be stretched out for as many seasons as possible, which means either you reach your climax (ORE… SANJOU!!, oh sorry, Den-O reference!) in season two and then somehow how have to figure out what the hell to do now that the story you were telling is effectively over and spend the next 3 years pulling shit out of thin air, which may or may not even be in the spirit of the original show… or you decide, we can’t let the story climax! Let’s spin our wheels all seasons in pointless tangents!, thus pissing off the people that WERE invested in the story you’ve chosen to stall on. And then your show gets cancelled before you get to take up your story again.

Not worth your time dealing business with them!