Soap opera whole episode analysis

  

This is a brief overview of an episode of the BBC 1 soap EastEnders and the ITV soap Coronation Street.  
To enhance my knowledge of soap operas, I decided to watch episodes a popular soap operas, and analyse aspects that you wouldn't normally focus on while watching a soap.
These are two individual episodes of the soaps, meaning they do not represent each soap as a whole, but from these, you can see where they overlap, and where they are different.
I've learnt that within soap operas, setting of scenes is something that overlaps among most soaps, for instance the centre of the community in many soaps is the Pub. Eastenders has The Queen Vic, Coronation Street has the Rovers Return and Emmerdale has The Woolpack. These pubs and their names are iconic and representational symbols of their soaps. Soaps also usually have a local shop, a club/bar and a cafe. To make soap operas verisimilitude, many scenes are shot in the houses of the characters, the kitchen and living area is widely used. By doing this they are directly reaching out to their audience to relate themselves to the characters within the soap, showing that the characters are ordinary people like themselves. By seeing this similar pattern in the use of setting throughout soaps, tell me that by using these typical locations we can create a successful soap.
Just from looking that this research above, you can tell that a popular story line is that of arguing couples, families and failed relationships, 'Soap operas make families seem important not by presenting an ideal family, but by presenting a family in constant turmoil.' Media Studies, a reader, Paul Marris & Sue Thornham, Edinburgh 1999. Exciting and griping story lines are what makes soap operas so popular.
Something that is different between the two is the way the Eastenders seems to have similar story lines running at once, whereas Coronation Street has many contrasting story lines within one episode. Both soaps are very successful, showing that by presenting story lines in either of these ways works. Eastenders probably shows stories in this way so the audience can build more of an opinion on certain characters by comparing them with other characters in similar situations, the downside to this could be that, if you are not a fan of a type of story line, then one episode could become repetitive. Coronations Streets idea would keep an episode fresh by displaying completely different stories back to back, the downside to this could be that the audience might feel distanced from the story as they've not had long enough to relate before the story switches once again.
I found doing this task a very helpful exercise, as I started to find out how much work must go into creating one half hour episode. Seeing how many scene changes and setting changes there were, will help us when we create our own soap opera as we know we must really consider location, setting and mise if we are to achieve a realistic soap.