Fringe Renewed For Fourth Season

well ... the problem is that fringe is headed towards a rather definitive ending.

the main story ends with either one scenario which - story-wise - grants the writers only limited
space for maneuvering. from a writer's point of view, filler episodes seem to be the means to
maintain an extended storyline.

too bad they come up with rather stupid ideas ...

as did everyone. either to return too early, or too late, and we tended to prefer to early. then
there were the breaks where we didn't need anything to eat or drink, and had no reason to visit the
toilette. smokers could use the opportunity to increase their daily nicotine dose, but even they got
stuck watching the odd commercial.

i like to think that i'm impervious to ads, as does nearly everyone. the fact remains, though, that
ads increase sales. so, they work on some of us, and whoever they work on, they work on someone who
believes themselves to be impervious.

there are two bottom lines, here:
1: commercials do work. it's sad, because it means humanity consists of a bunch of nitwits, but it's
true.
2: people never watched all that much of them. if you can get everyone to watch just a little, that
makes up for hours of traditional commercials that people avoid skillfully (though not 100%
efficiently).

and that's my point: the industry's goal shouldn't be to force feed us hours of commercials, much
more than ever before, but to get back to the traditional status quo, where people caught some few
minutes, a handful or less, every night. give people a full tv night (say 2 to 3 hours), on the net,
at the cost of 3 to 5 minutes of commercials, make it easy and legal, and you've got a business model.