GfS, I expected better of you. You ought to know that the soap opera / cliffhanger formats are designed to keep you coming back to watch the commercials.

A great movie creates a story arc in 100 or so minutes, which is the perfect amount of time for a normal person's attention span and bladder capacity.

And you'd have to be a very peculiar sort of lunatic to consider Gilligan's Island a masterpiece in any category. Have you seen The Riches, Weeds, or Breaking Bad? None of them are genius, but a little more challenging.