You're constantly yanked out of the narrative in service of ads even if you never see them, which has disfigured the medium.
That was the hallmark of old TV, on networks. Since the start of TV in the 50's.
There are tons of modern TV shows that don't do anything you're talking about because they're made for streamers or paid TV without ads.
It sounds like you watch different shows than I do, but I watch a lot of TV and haven't seen what you're talking about in many, many years. Not with Squid Game or Stranger Things on Netflix, or Andor on Disney+, or White Lotus on HBO, or Severance on Apple TV+, or even something like Alien: Earth currently on FX/Hulu.
You might want to find better places for watching TV...
One thing I do notice more and appreciate from streaming (sense8 in particular) is that shows are more varied in their runtime. Episodes being 40 minutes to 75 in length just depending on the needs of the plot, not even finale related or anything
I find that laugh-tracks are the aspect of older shows which I find harder to ignore. Still worth bearing with for some old shows though, especially as I gradually stop hearing them.
Do you have an example of a modern show that has the dramatic-music-and-cliffhanger ad-break?
If it is on a broadcast tv network, it's not really worth watching. Sure, there are the one or two exceptional shows, but with so much premium content, why would you want to watch that?
Surely there's a huge list of old broadcast TV network shows that are worth watching, and that still suffer from the ad-break problem to various degrees.
Obviously I'm pulling from a wide time-period, and I'll probably get some of these wrong because I'm not in the the US and don't quite grok the network/cable divide, but off the top of my head, I think these are/were all worth watching: Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Freaks and Geeks, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Community, Schitt's Creek, The Office, The X-Files, various Star Trek series, Cheers
That list could be easily improved on, but I assume it's missing your point anyway if you were only talking about current broadcast network TV (if it exists :) )
Almost all of those are broadcast shows. I strongly suspect that all of them are, but I don't have personal knowledge of the entire list.
As far as I can tell, the divide is pretty straightforward:
Cable: nudity
Broadcast: everything else
In theory there's no requirement for a cable show to have nudity, but since they're allowed to, they all do.
> Cable: nudity
> Broadcast: everything else
This is almost entirely wrong; non-premium cable (which is and was always the vast majority of cable) had and observed essentially the same structure and content rules as broadcast, with ad breaks and no swearing or nudity. Premium cable where each channel or later small branded group of channels is a separate surcharge on top of the broad package tended to have no ad breaks and looser content rules.
Deadliest Catch (Discovery Channel, 2005-)
Monk (USA Network. 2002-2009)
Mad Men (AMC, 2007-2015)
The Shield (FX, 2002-2008)
Beavis and Butt-Head (MTV, 1993-1997 & 2011)
Breaking Bad isn't the same format. No obvious commercial breaks, no saccharine Hays-Code-like bullshit.
Others mentioned The Shield, which is FX, and I tend to think of FX shows as not being of the broadcast mold. Monk was USA, I think, which as a network was borderline, but seems like a few of their original programming shows were not-horrible. Then someone said Deadliest Catch, but that's just cheap reality tv sludge and I feel dirty having typed out its title. Even the worst 1980s NBC sitcom was better than reality tv shows.
It's come to my attention that you're all, every last one of you, watching tv wrong.
Breaking Bad (like Mad Men, also on AMC) was presented with commercial breaks on AMC in its original run, and is structured around those breaks.