@jojo @coolboymew
Not a complete expert, but I'll try to explain how I understood things.
Basically television stations, for the longest time, started with 2 assumptions when it came to their kid audience.
The first one carried on from how they viewed the adult audience: that people don't always have the exact same free time on every day an episode was released. Sometimes they'd catch a couple of episodes with no issues, other times they were likely to miss one or two. Because they didn't want their audience to slowly lose track of the story and become disinterested to the point of abandoning the show, they went for a more episodic approach, where each individual episode is a smaller story you can follow by itself, episodes being at most loosely connected to one another. Star Trek is an excelent example of this.
The second assumption was one that was specifically made about their kid audience: that kids don't have the attention span required to follow complex multi-episodes story lines. While less of an accurate assumption, still some of their younger demographic were likely to lose track of the story. So they went with the lowest common denominator to get as big an audience as possible, and went even harder on the episodic approach, where there might be no connection between episodes at all. Tom & Jerry comes to mind as a good example.
It wasn't just the episodes weren't tied together, but the 20 min chunks always ended on mini cliffhangers to make it past the commercials. Then The Sopranos happened and production companies started learning that people would buy series on VHS and DVDs if they released the whole thing.
Free-to-play games are a big reversal of getting away from the crap dynamic of modern/good TV series and games with good mechanics or engaging story.