Hollyoaks nearly DEAD

Kala said:
I think they are trying to get a younger audience but forgetting that the only ones that watch the show these days are those that have been watching long term and love the older characters they’re axing.
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This is exactly the issue.

Neighbours tried the same thing around the late '00s by switching the focus to teen characters and rendering anyone older who'd been with the show longer term as supporting characters. Harcore fans stuck with it, but in general, it backfired because the intention was to shift the average audience age down. It's been much better for the last decade at telling stories across a more diverse - but ultimately older - demographic. I think all the UK soaps have gone through that transition to some extent. Look at EastEnders and the whole E20 spin-off. They managed to pull across a few characters into the main show, but even the more popular ones, like Fatboy, still had to be toned down a bit.

I can readily believe Hollyoaks skews a little younger than every other soap, but if it still is, that suggests its viewership is largely built on a transient audience. And I'm not sure that's sustainable for any TV show now.
 
Shoat said:
They had it fine up until the early 00s when they could set fire to a couple of sets, and it would be the closest thing to BIG EVENT that most terrestrial TV viewers would get, unless you stayed up until 11pm for ER.

Now it all seems rather TAME
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That's true. I wish ITV would stop doing "stunt week" because it becomes meaningless when something that's supposed to be a freak event is pencilled into the schedule every single year.

I think pacing is just way off these days, and that's primarily down to the volume of output. When ITV dropped the number of episodes of Coronation Street per week at the start of the pandemic, it conveniently coincided with the Geoff/Yasmeen plot reaching a peak. Suddenly, things that would have happened across 1½ episodes were spread across an entire week. It slowed the pace right down - but not to the point of being languid - and I think probably made that storyline feel more impactful as a result.
 
Finn said:
I think the reason the EE flash forward made so much noise was because it was something a mainstream soap hadn’t done, so it had a novelty to it. Even though aside from that element it was just the standard non pre-meditated murder that bonds a few characters together when they panic and don’t just CALL THE POLICE
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Hollyoaks already did a murder flash forward episode in 2009 and another one in 2019. :D
 
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