That's because what makes you think it was a good show, was superficial. It's based in creating emotionally shocking interactions between characters while hinting at a larger mystery within the story and then stringing the viewer along for as long as possible without ever writing a pay-off, probably because a pay-off is a risk: people are usually split whether they liked what happened after a reveal, or a plotline developing in a big way. It's safer financially to keep stringing us along without completing the story arch.

I noticed it around when Lost got big years ago. The story will hint at possible interesting stuff that will come later, while focusing almost entirely on the interpersonal relationships between the characters. They rely on the viewers excitement and imagination to fill in blanks, but the problem is they suck at storytelling (not to be confused with ''drama-telling''), so they don't have the storytellers ability to fill in the blanks in a satisfying way. So they'll create a concept, develop the characters in a dramatic and juicy way, hint at cool stuff that might happen in the future, reap the rewards to getting everybody all excited and ''wondering'' what's going to happen, those people hype the program up and then it either fizzles out and the story changes without ever addressing all the mystery, or it gets cancelled.

As soon as you notice the pattern you can really identify the offenders within the first episode or two and save yourself a LOT of time.

Thankfully, I stopped watching Lost after the first season and have avoided the emotional dramas wrapped in other packages for a long time.