Killing Serials

Item: ABC has announced that it's pulling the Wednesday night drama "The Nine" off the year. It may return later in the season, but the low-ratings yank is almost surely a death sentence for the show.
Despite my fondness for ensemble dramas, I took only a passing interest in this show, missing nearly all the episodes. It is a knockoff of its lead-in show, "Lost," which is also losing my interest. What's killing both those shows is an inherent catch-22 problem with suspense-driven shows. The producers want to hook you and keep you hooked by drawing out plot details as long as possible. But they know that once they satisfy viewers' curiosity, they'll lose them in droves.
Hence the problem with "Lost." I'm losing my patience. I strongly suspect the creators never envisioned the show going this far when they wrote the pilot, and so never thought this dar in advance. Now they're grasping at straws trying to keep it going without bringing the story to a conclusion: i.e. the plane crash survivors either get rescued or killed or figure out they're all hallucinating.
Good writers know how to continue building suspense with multiple, layered and staggered plot lines, so that just as one secret is revealed another mystery unfolds. You see it on soap operas every day (I used to watch them). These folks on "Lost" and "The Nine" and "Kidnapped" and some of the other serial shows haven't mastered that skill.
"Lost" continues to be a hit, probably because enough people are dying to figure out what's really going on on that island. But it's not surprising that the knockoff shows have fallen flat, since there is only so much suspense people can take week afetr week without gratification.