Originally Posted by H of De Vil:
“I am no way being dismissive of the older audience. I'm not suggesting Corrie should be aiming at a younger audience either. All I'm saying is that Corrie is able to stay stronger given its older audience skew.
I am not ageist anyway. I;m just giving a reason why Corrie is able to stay stronger than that of EE.
Do you watch Corrie? Have you enjoyed this years storylines?”
No, I'm not a CS watcher, so have no opinion on its storylines.
From a ratings pov, I find it strange, that even though it's still regularly the best rated soap currently airing, it gets no credit whatsoever for this fact
As an outsider only judging on the responses on places such as DS, it seems very clear that it's not a soap that is attractive to the highly excitable and volatile social media tv fraternity - and, as such, the viewers who do watch it, get dismissed as somehow being of lesser value and of lesser importance to the tv industry.
Social media has become a culture within itself - a culture which the tv industry itself has become a big part of - BUT - it is not a wholly encompassing culture.
I can't help but wonder if social media has become TOO important to the tv world - that they have become TOO reliant on its responses to their shows & businesses?
Has tv become too reliant on chasing after "social media friendly" tv that the industry itself has become "detached" from its wider audience?
Is that maybe why the popularity of simple shows like GBBO causes so much bewilderment to many (especially on this thread)?
There's no doubt, in today's much riddled "throwaway awards" driven tv industry, that shows which attract the attention of the social media crowd are sought after like the Holy Grail - and the tv soap industry is no exception.
With soap awards being handed out willy-nilly by almost every soap magazine and tv internet media site (DS is no exception with its constant polls for best storyline of the week etc. etc.), that soap production teams have an incentive to cater narratively for the social media crowd.
Any award - no matter how trivial or meaningless - garners publicity and generates social media attention & headlines (even if it's only for a day) – but much of this “throwaway” award industry (and it has become an industry within itself) is reliant on social media participation.
The big problem in trying to attract the attention of the social media fraternity is that it is a largely fickle social group that needs to be constantly entertained.
That’s okay for shows which have relatively short runs on tv such as XF or IACGMOOH – but it becomes a different ball game when dealing with long running tv drama such as soaps.
When I joined this forum almost 6 years ago, HO was the darling of the soaps forum – even though it was the distant cousin ratings wise from the big 3 – it was the soap which generated the most traffic.
It was fast paced, exciting, filled with good looking characters and had an almost cult-like following with just enough believability in its characters to give the drama integrity. But in order to maintain the attention of its (very vocal) social media following, it’s had to continue down the path of stunts, twists, deaths and shocking sensationalist narratives – to the point where it’s lost all narrative integrity and the characters themselves have become meaningless plot driven caricatures.
It is no longer the darling of the DS soaps forum – even its “entertain me now” social media fandom have woken up to the ridiculousness of it as any kind of meaningful long-term drama to get invested in.
ED has now become the darling of the DS soaps forum and is currently riding on a social media high – ironically, because it has moved down the same narrative route that HO did a while back. It has become fast paced & sensationalist with more narrative twists & turns than a bag of snakes – it has upped the ante in terms of violence, deaths and stunt driven scenarios – and it has attracted the attention of the “entertain me now” social media fraternity as they flock to it in droves through social media channels and chatter about how “exciting” it is.
But already – it is starting to lose its narrative integrity – these last few weeks have seen the culmination of a number of sensationalist and shocking storylines come to a climax – a character who’d grown up on the show as a rampant heterosexual, suddenly taking a gay lover, trying to kill said gay lover’s entire family before tearfully telling him he loved him as he pointed a gun at his lover’s head for threatening to tell his wife about them – even more surprising, no-one in the village was even shocked by this gay affair revelation! Even more surprising will be the fact that said gay lover will no doubt still be in love with him and the “snogging affair” which has garnered its own cult following will begin again to keep the voting fanbase on board.
A female character caught between two brothers which all got revealed on their wedding day – not much new or shocking about that, oh wait, brother who got married “accidentally” kills other brother & dumps his body in a ditch – aha, but is he really dead the fans cry (and of course the show will keep us guessing – what better way to keep the fans interested in the show) – as if that wasn’t enough drama, we had a helicopter, through a series of contrived circumstances crash into the hall amidst the wedding – death, destruction, carnage (well, actually no-where near as much as the pre-show hype led us to believe) – and then in a shocking narrative twist, this major disaster that befell a sleepy village gets nary a mention by anyone a few episodes later as we’re transported off to a parallel universe in the village with a contrived arrest, violence in a prison, another affair revealed in shocking fashion, a shock pregnancy of a woman who’s closer to menopause (oh, and a potential miscarriage by the next episode)
Yes – it’s all very high-octane narrative storytelling and has the social media fraternity chattering excitedly – but it lacks long-term narrative integrity. How long now till the characters become as ridiculous as those in HO?
Has this well publicised stunt improved ratings – yes, of course it has – but for how long?
Till the next big twist or shocking sensationalist reveal or death or stunt gets the social media classes chattering again – it becomes a never-ending cycle until the narrative integrity of the show becomes so ridiculous that it can only be looked upon as soap fantasy rather than soap fiction.
Look at EE – it won a shed-load of awards earlier this year and social media went into overdrive – has it put bums on seats in the long-term?
Where have all those once-upon-a-time regulars viewers gone and why have they gone?
Maybe social media tv needs to stop dismissing CS’s ratings as mindless OAP’s and start asking why the other soaps are spectacularly failing to maintain the consistency in ratings that CS does?
After all - they all have access to the same viewership.
