As Theodore Sturgeon said, 90% of everything is crap. Yes, the majority of visual entertainment is disposable, as are the majority of books, the majority of plays, the majority of the visual arts.

But mass entertainment can and does occasionally achieve the level of art. Your complaints of the rules of conformity pre-existing formats could be applied to the sonnet. To be a sonnet, a poem must fit one of a few strict structural formulas. So too must commercial film and television...though the available formats and acceptable structures are far more varied than sonnets. Yet both can be art, and last beyond the moment, in the right hands.