 Both the procedural and the serial are typical weekly formats of U.S. television that also dominate Western international TV. Another very important and well-known weekly format that again follows very different rules are the half-hour comedy show or the sitcom, a term stemming from situation comedy. It involves comedic episodic shows like, for example, Full House, Two and a Half Man, How I Met Your Mother or, as one of the famous sitcoms, Friends. In this chapter we will not be able to dig deeper in its structures as they again would need whole units to be discussed. But if interested, please check out our reading tips. Apart from these weekly formats, however, a huge part of television series are so-called dailies or soaps, dailies screen formats that, in contrast to serials and procedurals, are seldomly distributed via DVD or enjoying re-runs, still nearly every country has them. Rebecca Arn, who works for Germany's biggest production company for TV series, Euphor Serial Drama, tells us about Good Times, Bad Times, Germany's most successful daily TV show. I think we had 5,000 episodes a couple of years ago, so I think it's 20 years now, which is a long time. It's an access primetime show running right before 8.15 when the primetime starts, and it's extremely successful. What generally are the major differences in telling stories about a character in a daily series versus telling them in any other TV format? I think when you tell a story that is a 90-minute one-off or a weekly show of 8 or 15 or 25 episodes or like a daily drama that you see every night for every year, the character has to be adapted. It can still be a similar character, but you have to sort of consider how the people are who watch it. I think a lot of time and especially in our business, we care a lot about how people accept our content. What mood are they? What do they want? What are they like? What do they like? And if you watch one-off, of course you have to be a lot quicker. You have 90 minutes to tell a story about the person. You don't have the opportunity to tell over a 20-piece arc. You can still sort of let things out, and no one is expecting you. Everyone knows that in a 90-minute piece, and everyone feels that you don't see everything about a person or a character, so you're a lot more inclined to sort of interpret, pertain into that character. But what does this specifically mean for a character in weekly series? When you tell a weekly series, you have a lot more freedom because you have months or even years to tell the story about the person. You can show different sides. You can show different traits. You can be a lot more nuanced. And you can also adapt the character to what fits the show, which is really good. You have the time. You don't have that time when you have a 90-minute film because it's going to be how it's going to be. Here you can see, oh, that didn't work out right. He doesn't really play with that well, or you can say in this story it's getting sort of boring, telling it like this. Maybe you should sort of adapt him and make him more strong, more decisive or whatever. So that sort of gives you the full freedom of telling a story. Rebecca talks about character development and different traits of the characters that are presented to the audience during the episodes and seasons of a weekly series. But what specifics in character design and development can we find in dailies and why? What does that mean for the stories that are told? With the daily, it's still a little bit different. Of course you have a lot of time to tell a story about a character, but then again you have to consider that most people watch daily dramas as a sort of evening snack. It's what you do every night. It's sort of doing your evening yoga or whatever or bringing your kids to bed. That's how you watch these dailies, meaning that you don't want to have it overly complex. You don't want overly deep series. We sort of calculate that an average viewer watches maybe three or four episodes a week. We have five episodes a week. So they miss a lot. And it can't be a problem and you still have to understand the character and you still have to be like, oh no, why is he like this? Why isn't he like this? I expect him to be like this. So you're a lot more sort of strict in being precise and simplifying even though you can't be boring. And then there's another thing that you have to be careful not sort of to overuse. I mean, in the dailies, you have about 20, 25 characters in the main cast. So you have lots of stories to tell. That's sort of the point because you have to have a lot of stories to tell. And here you have to sort of consider how to sort of use these characters and especially how to know when you've told everything you have to tell about this character. Killing people off or sending them to New Zealand is one of the hardest things to do for a storyteller if you love that character. But sometimes it's just necessary rather than hanging on to characters forever. So I think that's how it differs. I think it can be a lot more tricky to be sort of nuanced, etc. And you have to consider that if you have a show where you have a character that's going on for 10 years, people expect him to be in a certain way and the fans, they know their character better than the authors do, so they think. So a lot has to do with sort of playing with their expectation and sort of even sometimes giving them what they want and sometimes not giving them what they want. But still focusing on making them feel secure. The longer a TV show is running, the more important it is to make sure the viewer, the audience knows what's going on and has been going on before. That means we need special tools to give this information to the viewer. Rebecca tells us how this works. I think some technique or one technique to deal with telling people or reminding people of the plot. Of course, it's flashbacks, etc. That's a classic, but you can't do that every week. And if you have a daily drama where you have five episodes a week and people watching about three, you have to work with different aspects. One aspect is using something that's called, in Germany, it's called an ear. And it's sort of having a scene where someone tells something that has happened to a friend, the ear, being sort of the listener to that story. And then he may comment in his own way and you tell like, I'm really worried, my husband has been having an affair and I killed him last night and I'm really worried about that. And you have to have different takes on the same story, but you always have to be careful not to tell the story the same way over and over again because otherwise you're going to get bored, especially for those people who watch five episodes a week because they want to see something else. The expectance of viewers to get a lot of information is not the same when you watch a daily show because that's not how you watch. You're not in for lots of info. You're in for email. You're in for fun, for relaxation. That's how you watch daily series. And that makes the experience completely different than the expectance completely different. What's important when talking about daily formats is the difference between daily soaps like good times, bad times, we talked about before, that are potentially endless as long as they are successful. And, on the other side, an originally Latin and Southern American daily format, the telenovela, like Yosoi Betty Lafea, the Colombian telenovela Aglibetti was based on. Telenovelas usually tell the story of a poor or mistreated woman working her way up in society, falling in love with and finally, after many struggles, getting and marrying the handsome and rich guy and finding happiness. In telenovelas, therefore, the ending is the climax of the whole series, whereas a daily soap like good times, bad times doesn't build up to such an ending, but tries to constantly deliver the same emotional level. What's interesting in examining German TV during the last years is the way telenovelas have been adopted here. In cases like alles was zählt, all that counts, or Sturm der Liebe, which might be storm of love, the storyline with the happy ending for the couple was finished off with the couple leaving the scenery and a new couple being introduced. And then again and then again. What we can see here is again a mixture of formats, in this case a melting pot of telenovelas and daily soaps. One could also say that switching between formats is applied here when one series seems too successful to just end. In the next unit, we will have a look at how the production of a daily series like good times, bad times differs from the production of a US weekly.