During last season's run of the hit ABC prime time soap, the 30-year-old Roy mother of three faithfully fired up her digital video recorder each week to record the trials of the frazzled women of Wisteria Lane.

And when she found a one-hour open slot in her own hurried life, she would hit the play button - sans her husband of course - and watch it with a keen eye, usually while folding her laundry.

"Even though my life is boring, there has to be some drama somewhere," she said about why she's hooked on the top-10 TV drama. "And I can't be nosy around my neighbors, so I want to be on TV."

Atwood, like millions of fans like her, are glued to the continuing stories that percolate in this suburban mecca week to week. Fail to catch an episode, and you could get irreparably lost.

But TV producers like "Desperate Housewives' " Marc Cherry are counting on their rich story lines and riveting characters to guide faithful viewers back to their shows week after week. And the trend has been catching on. Many of the new shows for this season, which officially begins next week, will have complicated continuing story lines. Serialized TV is back in a big way.

Cherry just hopes it stays that way.

"Will people like my show this year? I don't know," he told The Salt Lake Tribune as he reflected on his success. "I was surprised they liked it the first year. I created three flops. I wasn't the guy known for turning out hits. Now I'm Marc Cherry, the creator of 'Desperate Housewives.' Oh how in the hell did that happen?"

Maybe it's because Cherry turned what normally would whiff of just soap opera conventions into long, complex stories which are not standalone episodes, a structure that has helped catapult other shows like "Lost" and "24" to the top of the Nielsen charts.

And because Hollywood likes to copy success, the television landscape is being flooded with new shows like them.

New entries like "Reunion," "Prison Break," "Supernatural," "Invasion" and "Sex, Love & Secrets" are all going to rely on committed fans sticking with each episode as the story unfolds week to week.

While that may have been harder to do in an era where technophobes didn't know how to program their boxy VCR, in today's digital world, scheduling television around your own time is as simple as pronouncing "TiVo."

Add to that the popularity of whole television seasons on DVD - which has become its own home video market - and it's much easier to keep up with the complicated story lines of today's serialized television series.

"With the advent of TiVo and with DVDs . . . there's a new culture going on where people want to get the box set, or they want to get Netflix to send them four or five DVDs," said "Prison Break" creator Paul Scheuring. "In a lot of ways, it's like reading a novel."

Continuing story lines in Hollywood entertainment were once the staple of soap operas or the serials of the 30s and 40s. But today TV series have adopted the concept andare creating more sophisticated television with richer characters.

"That format is now associated with higher quality shows," said Becca Cragin, assistant professor at Bowling Green State University's department of popular culture, who specializes in television. "It's because of the competition [broadcast] television faces from cable. [A network like HBO] has upped the ante of its nighttime programming and become more innovative, experimenting with new structures to find a new way to hook audiences."

Like Atwood. She's ready to start gabbing with her friends about the new season of "Desperate Housewives" on her America Online message forum (which is devoted to Mormon parents).

Here's what we know about the new year: Susan (Teri Hatcher) continues to see Mike (James Denton) as he becomes obsessed with finding Zach, the unstable teen who was kidnapped from Utah. The frayed stay-at-home mom, Lynnette (Felicity Huffman), will get a job and bump heads with her new boss. And the pregnant Gabrielle (Eva Longoria) will hire a lawyer to get her husband out of jail, only the attorney will develop a mad crush on her.

"I have to ask the wardrobe [department]," Longoria quipped about finding the answer. "Wardrobe has all the answers because they have to buy the most ahead of time, and they haven't bought any maternity clothes yet."