📺 Why do those family drama serials still get such big numbers

My mother watches 2 or 3 serials every evening, same slot, and has done since I was small. If the power goes off at 8, she looks at the ceiling like it has betrayed her. I grew up in that house, so I've seen bits of every serial for 25 years. I still can't tell you why anyone watches them. Nothing in them makes sense. People come back from the dead with one line of explanation. A 10 year time jump changes everyone. The same family fight repeats every few months with different curtains in the background. My mother knows all this. She laughs at it herself and says the plot is rubbish. Then she turns the volume up the second the music starts. I asked her once what the point is, if she knows it's silly. She thought for a while. She said the story isn't the point. It's like checking in on distant relatives every evening. You don't need them to do anything exciting. You just want to see they're still around. That made sense to me, and I stopped teasing her about it after that. I still can't sit through a whole episode. I get restless after 10 minutes and go to the kitchen. But I know every background music sting by heart. Every dramatic reveal has the same loud noise. It's burned into my head from childhood and I can hum it on command. Do your parents watch these too, or has everyone moved on to phones?

The background music sting point made me laugh out loud reading it, my mother's phone ringtone is apparently a clip of one from her own favourite serial, she gets teased mercilessly about it at every single family function without fail lately.

That line about checking in on distant relatives explains my own grandmother perfectly, she treats missing an episode almost like missing a family visit, gets visibly annoyed if the power goes out during her fixed hour. Never understood it myself until I watched her face during a particularly ordinary, low stakes episode last month, pure comfort, nothing more complicated than that.