by Lorelai George

Created on: August 22, 2010

I'm really not a fan of soap operas.  I find them over the top, melodramatic and garish.  The only one I'll watch willingly is Home and Away, and I often ask myself why this is.  I've watched the majority of the soap operas that air in the UK (where I live), and was even a fan of them once, but not any more.  However, many of the people I know are still loyal fans and have been for years.

I think one of the things that people like about them is that the story lines are often so over the top that it offers them an escapism element.  It may be set in a world that's familiar to them (the East End of London, for instance), but many of the things that happen to those characters would never happen to the viewer.

On the other hand, some of the every day things, and occasionally some of the more extreme story lines, will happen to people.  They have both elements of fantasy and reality, without the need for mass amounts of special effects and because they're running all year around, people can rely on them more than anything else for a little bit of structure, relaxation and escapism for half an hour.

They also have vast arrays of characters, meaning that there's inevitably going to be one that the viewer can relate to, as well as one that they enjoy viewing, such as a villain, and possibly one that they find attractive.  These types of characters are always fun for people to watch because they care about what happens to them, and when you care about the characters, you're more likely to keep going back.

Some of those characters, if the show lasts for long enough, which many soap operas do, viewers get to watch grow up.  They get to see them as a baby, then as a child, a teenager and so on.  They get to cheer them on through each of their firsts, they get to feel their pain when things go wrong for them and they get to be a part of that character's life.  They form an attachment to them.  Maybe just to one character, to a few, or perhaps to them all.

Soap operas also have a sense of community that many modern day communities lack - everyone is there for each other, a lot of the time enemies often become allies and vice versa, and everyone knows everyone, because that's the only way that the stories will work properly.  It takes people back to a time when face-to-face communication was more important than what happened over the internet, because, as a storyteller, you can do so much more, and it's far more interesting for the viewer to watch something where a character is talking in person to another character than watch them send text messages.

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