We're soap fans. We watch a throwaway scene or hear a line that doesn't quite 'fit' what we expected and we immediately think "There has to be some reason why they threw that in there. The writers were laying groundwork for some big reveal, or were tossing out a clue they want us to notice." Mary coughed. Oh, she must be terminally ill. Joe got a phone call and said it was a wrong number. He's hiding an affair with a co-worker. We (and I guess by extension, everyone) don't want things to be un-structured and meaningless, so we try to 'fill in the blanks' by hanging all these events onto a structure we already have in our mind. This assumes of course there is a omnipotent 'writer' throwing all this stuff out there, expecting us to understand where he/she is headed with all these plot points. Does it all actually fit together in the end, or is it just a lot of stream-of-consciousness stuff that was never meant to make any sense beyond the time it aired?