Word: soaps
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There's no surer sign of a fading soap opera than a lurid plot twist. Unlike their glossy American counterparts, British soaps traditionally aim for stolid social realism, depicting ordinary folk pursuing humdrum lives. Now dwindling audiences are spurring producers to unleash implausible killers and gothic disasters on their workaday protagonists. Take the hapless citizens of Walford, a fictional London borough that is the setting for EastEnders, one of Britain's top-rated soaps. Recent episodes have seen a troubled adolescent kidnap his estranged stepfather, chip-shop owner Ian Beale, to exact revenge for his psychopathic mother's death...
...past few months, the BBC has itself resembled a superannuated soap, the long-term future of the 85-year-old institution called into question as it lurches from embarrassing revelations about editorial lapses to high-level resignations, job cuts and threatened strikes. Management has apologized for such breaches of trust as falsifying the results of a public vote to name a cat on the children's show Blue Peter (producers rejected the winning entry "Cookie" in favor of "Socks") and showing a trailer for the documentary A Year with the Queen with scenes shown out of sequence to suggest (deceptively...
...most popular output; the more esoteric BBC2; the commercial network ITV; and Channel 4, then only four years old and set up to break the duopoly of the BBC and ITV. The greatest challenge to EastEnders' popularity came in the proletarian form of ITV's long-running soap Coronation Street...
...Penthouse Coffee Bar on the top floor to any student organization that brings 10 or more students to the showing. SOCH chose to show “Grey’s Anatomy”—which the New York Times called a “sagging hospital soap opera,” in a review this month—after consulting student opinion. “Grey’s Anatomy” is listed as the favorite show of Facebook.com users in the Harvard network. “A lot of people have ‘Grey?...
...becoming Prime Minister in 1988, she has hopscotched into and out of power with archrivals Nawaz Sharif, the former Prime Minister who was ousted by military coup in 1999, and Musharraf. For the past 20 years those names have dominated the Pakistani political scene. "It really is like a soap opera," says Haq. "Year after year we still see the same faces, the same plot and the same kind of deal making." And it seems, the formulaic cliffhangers...