EastEnders

This engaging British series has been a favorite of mine since I was a girl. The families of this fictitious End London borough become familiar faces and names as the show follows generations of the characters thorough their lives. "EE" is more than a working-class soap opera---it's a genuine episodic drama, which is painfully rare here in the US. The storylines arc over months and years instead of days and weeks like American dramas are scheduled. Unlike many American "soap opera-type" series, the majority of episodes are penned by male scriptwriters. The action can be slow-building, but it is engaging. It takes a few viewings to understand who's who and what's what, but with all the websites devoted to this show, the details and characters can be sorted soon enough. Thanks to the advent of cable TV and the BBC America satellite channel, Americans can watch this cozy drama with only a slight lag behind their British counterparts. Grab your favorite ale and some fish and chips and try this show out.

I've watched and loved Eastenders for decades but my God am I hating the storylines more and more every year! It's become a boring unbearable depressive drag!

This stupid neverending Keanu saga will drag on all year no doubt, the alcoholic Linda, the looney Denise, the stuck up Suki and her backwards and forwards lesbian affair...where are the likes of Mitchells and good stories relating to them,...that family made the soap, nothing happens anymore! The slapper Stacy and her numerous kids and affairs...the perv Dean...where's Shirley by the way?! All the Linda's kids?? And did you lose a gem in Danny Dyer...him leaving killed it completely for me!

I've never been sure if soaps are supposed to simulate real-life. If they are meant for this purpose, that's got to be the biggest waste of time in history. Why simulate real-life? We can all admit that most of our lives are repetitive and dull, so why would anyone want to watch a simulation of that, played out by people who don't even exist?

Eastenders is unconvincing to the extreme. Nobody seems to own a computer, washing machine or car. People seem to buy shares in local businesses within a matter seconds, with someone owning "half the Arches" or "half the Vic". Sam walks around with "the books", which really are books! Most business managers have computers and accountants to do that for them. Those who run stalls on the market like to leave their livelihoods with friends, simply handing over their money pouches. They're the lucky ones - a lot of the cast don't have jobs at all so how they manage to survive in east London is beyond me.

The "gangsters" are so unrealistic it's hard to watch. The scripts are terrible, mainly down to watershed restrictions, so the writers cannot include most swear-words and are forced to use words like "moron", "idiot" and "wally" which don't really work on the same scale.

Strangely enough, soaps are the shows that are watched the most in the UK, and I don't understand this. Numerous soap magazines are on the shelves, and these tell us what's going to happen in the coming weeks, so nobody really needs to watch at all.

I don't understand the concept of soaps, why anyone feels the need to watch and why there are so many.

BBC America runs an omnibus once a week of this popular British soap opera. If you don't get BBC America, call your cable company and ask about digital cable- it's generally only about 10 bucks more a month than regular cable, and you get more channels. That said, I was hooked from the first time I watched "EastEnders" a little over a year ago. It took a few episodes and a book ("EastEnders Who's Who", available from amazon.com)for me to catch on, but it was worth it. These characters, although sometimes predictable (cheating exes, guy gets fatal brain tumor, etc,)are more realistic than any lame-o American soap- maybe because they don't sport red sequinned dresses and 5 pounds of make-up at 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. There's a chock full of good stuff happening in Albert Square- call you cable operator and get the Beeb if, for nothing else, this fabulous show!

I have watched Eastenders for years from 2000 as I lived in South Africa, but it is just too boring now. I can't watch it anymore. All doom and gloom.

Everyone is trying to get one up on the other, scripts are shocking, and people not getting there just deserts for murder, how long can a person go about daily life.