It was mostly hyper formulaic episodic slop that went nowhere and meant nothing, and most of those shows still only got a season or two vs now when a successful show becomes at least a decade long slop factory.

Like The Sopranos was notable for being the first TV show to experiment with the idea of having "a plot" in which "things actually happen", even though going back and watching it it still looks very formulaic and episodic particularly in the first season. It's like the Citizen Kane of prestige TV slop. And I mean I'm obviously exaggerating a bit for comedic effect but goddamn was the entire model of TV production so fucking bad before The Sopranos popularized the idea of actually progressing the fucking story episode to episode, like as bad as the modern Netflix slop model of "write every episode with the assumption the viewer isn't actively viewing the screen so everyone explains what's going on all the time" is TV used to be based on the model of "assume all episodes are viewed in a random order as reruns and the viewer is someone who's never seen the show before and just tuned in at the last ad break" which sucks even worse.