The effect is to lure your attention forward like a mechanical rabbit teasing a greyhound. The luring forward never ceases for very long. If it did, you might become aware of the vacuousness of the content that can get through the inherent limitations of the medium. Then you would be aware of the boredom. Commercials have roughly double the amount of these interruptions per minute.
Television is an extremely odd phenomenon.
On the one hand it offers non-unique, totally repetitive experience. No matter what is on television, the viewer is sitting in a darkened room with almost all systems shut down, looking at a flickering light. But within this deprived, repetitive, inherently boring environment, television producers create a fiction that something unusual is going on, thereby fixing attention. Leaving the television to go outdoors, or to have an ordinary conversation, becomes unsatisfying. This begins to explain Attention Deficit Disorder and the drastically declining skills in written and verbal articulation that are becoming so rampant now in society.