How many cliffhangers does it take?

I was thinking about the NHK year-long drama. This is on the national television channels, and they run a daily 15 minute segment five days a week throughout the year. The current show focuses on a young girl whose fiancé is a member of an old-style ryokan (hotel), but he had left the hotel. However, she decides that it is important to learn the business, and the okami (the matriarch of the hotel) agrees. Needless to say, this upsets a number of relationships - the young man who thought he was going to take over, and so forth. But the key thing is that almost every show has some kind of a hook or cliffhanger. It may be as simple as having a character look somewhere and call out a name, it may be a customer falling to the floor in evident distress, but there is the running "to be continued" grabber. And if you think about it, over the year there are about 5x50 or 250 cliffhangers. So even people (like my wife) who start out saying they really don't want to watch it this year are likely to get caught somewhere along the way on one of those hooks and watch just one more to see what's going to happen, and then one more, . . . and the next thing they know, it's the end of the year. It probably helps that the segments are repeated, each one being shown two or three times daily (once in the morning on the HD channels, once on the regular channels, and then again at lunchtime), and there is a collection on Saturday in case you missed something during the week. But somehow when I suggest to people that they skip the daily and just watch the weekend collection, that doesn't work.

It's interesting how simple most of the hooks are, too. Just start an action and interrupt it, with plenty of possibilities for where the action will go next.