So will there be any love triangles? The creator and producers of TV3's new soap opera Red Rock, exposed to the press for the first time last week, were probably expecting a more sophisticated opening gambit from The Irish Times. "Not so far," was the reply, "but of course there are going to be people who like other people who in turn like someone else."
Phew. A soap without a love triangle isn't worthy of the name. Just two episodes of Red Rock have been written to date, so the warning from creator Peter McKenna and producers John Yorke (Company Pictures) and Ed Guiney (Element Pictures) that there was very little they could reveal about the show is partly because there is much that is still to be decided (including the all-important casting of "fresh faces").
What we know so far is that Red Rock is not quite a police drama, "it's not The Bill", but a community-based soap set in a fictional Dublin coastal town that revolves around a Garda station."Police are just a brilliant way of exploring wider society," says Yorke, who was executive producer of EastEnders from 2000 to 2002. Anyone for a harbour drugs haul?
This is where the love triangle question comes in. How much of Red Rock is going to be devoted to the classic soap plots - heartbreak, adultery, teenage pregnancies; births, deaths and marriages; secrets, lies and (my personal favourite) long-lost relatives - and how much of it will be an attempt to weave in Zeitgeist-y, headline-derived "issues" and gritty realism?
The early indications are that viewers can expect a mix of the old emotional staples with some topical content - the odd sneaky fumble through the Garda Pulse system, perhaps. With any luck, the soap's senior police officers will be about as useless at their job as, say, Olivia Colman's detective inspector in Broadchurch, rather than pillars that predictably "fix" the community every time it fractures.
The soap definitely "won't be all murders" and won't have "fake cliffhangers", the producers say, but it won't quite follow the standard format either. Red Rock is billed as a twice-weekly soap opera, and it centres on "two or three" families, but it will also have a story-of-the-week formula where a mini-arc introduced in the first episode, involving guest actors, will be resolved in the second.
TV3's director of content Jeff Ford is keen that Red Rock does not take on the nostalgic tone of other soap operas. Coronation Street dates back to 1960 and sometimes feels like it. Its enduring popularity is down to its producers' faith in the strength of its characters - the best scenes tend often involve a bunch of them shooting the breeze in the Rover's Return and edging the plot forward in sips rather than gulps.
Soap operas might be famed for their ridiculous rollercoaster twists and turns, but producers paradoxically risk weakening their brand in the long term whenever they try to up the ante for a short-term ratings spike.
Serial killer plotlines are a particular culprit for falling the wrong side of the line between the larger-than-life and the extraordinary. Gangsters, which proliferated in EastEnders in the post-Yorke era, are another tedium, invariably offering little more than pointless pre-watershed bravado and cul-de-sac musings on family honour. Get-rick-quick schemes, meanwhile, are best left to Del Boy, and money-trouble plots, though relatable, risk falling foul of TV3's "we entertain" motto.
The development time seems tight, but TV3 is under big pressure to get Red Rock right from the off. It must replace at least some of the chunk of advertising income that will migrate to UTV in January once it snatches Coronation Street and Emmerdale on an exclusive basis, and to do this, TV3 needs a soap that has a tone that fits with its brand and is sufficiently strong to have a "halo" effect on the rest of its evening schedule.
It is counting on the fact that Irish viewers like Irish content. But while making 104 half-hour episodes a year is certainly not cheap, neither is viewers’ time. Taking on a new soap is a massive commitment on the part of the audience too, and if they don’t like what and who they see upfront, they will drift away.
That is what typically happens with soap operas anyway, as Ford has pointed out - it’s a “J curve”. Ratings tend to start off high, then plummet, before ideally travelling back up again, as viewers begin to engage with the characters and incorporate them into their routines. Commercially, this could prove an awkwardly slow burn for TV3 in the years ahead. Ultimately, however, the best soaps are those that refrain from going overboard in their effort to woo viewers and instead reward the patience of the loyal.
