Honestly I think the reason no one can figure out the 'formula' is because emersion in a show, *especially* fantasy, is different things to different people.

My grandson and I are ADHD, my husband of nearly 2 decades is not. But we all like various fiction. Hubby follows the "I won't watch/read it until it's completed because I don't want to be left hanging." This is why he had stopped *reading* WoT, because the author ed away. For him, it's continuity of production and storyline. If Jackson had completely messed up Lord of the Rings, he would have never watched any of the rest of them. He never did finish The Hobbit movies because the 1st deviated too much.

My grandson and I however love to sit and talk about the themes, interactions between characters, and environment in which they exist. Sometimes during the movie - which is why my husband often can't sit and watch with us!

My grandson, being of the generation of reaction videos, has a bad habit of wanting to address those things on the spot in the moment, and both of us being ADHD, we have a tendency to need to say at least *something* brief on the spot, or by the end of the movie or whatever, it's gone from our heads 😁

We all tend to be pretty faithful to the source material, Wheel of Time, Harry Potter, anime, comic books, whatever. It tends to mess with our concept of the "reality" we're trying to be immersed into (something that ADHD people often struggle with,) especially if we *think* we know what to expect if we've already been exposed to through either an anime or a book series, etc.

I agree with Sanderson, doing a several hour long movie and breaking it apart could easily be a workaround, but that won't work if the *story* we're watching isn't the story we already know. I mean who would bother to watch Sherlock Holmes if Moriarty was a hero? Even worse if a character that never existed in the source material was the villain... It just makes no sense.