Many Soaps attempt to create a balance between realism and drama. The former enables the audience to relate to the situation each character is in adding more interest where as the later keeps the audience hooked and actively interested to see what happens next. If this isn't correctly balanced it can cause a large loss of the audience, for instance in East Enders when it goes to the point of unrealistic with characters being buried alive a large portion of the audience could no longer relate and therefore stopped watching or filed a complaint, even though it had a huge amount of drama which undoubtedly did keep some of the audience interested.
Where as on the other end of the spectrum East Enders is realistic by how it's always chronological, you never jump back and forth within an episode. Also it enforces realism by having holidays actually on the day such as a special Christmas episode, valentines on valentines day and not having Christmas during august. Likewise Coronation Street follows a similar pattern keeping time correct.
East Enders also has drama in with relationship disputes, fraud, distrust, fights and of course a wedding or death thrown in once a season to keep the drama and suspense thereby keeping the audience hooked enough to sit down the next night and watch it all over again. However coronation street for instance has low drama due to wanting to attract the older audience.
Overall soaps strive to keep a balance between the two because it promises a more main stream audience against a more specific one.
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You provide clear example to back up your points here. You can also consider how we expect certain levels of realism from different soaps. Can Emmerdale, for example, get away with a lesser degree of realism that Eastenders? If so, why?
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