User reviews

Hollyoaks can get really rather addictive, but no matter how juicy the storyline you've been following is, there is no doubt that it will have a VERY anti-climatic conclusion and all the characters will return to normal within the next week and completely forget anything remotely traumatic ever happened to them.

The acting is dreadful, there is no real emotion, the dialogue is stilted and the accents are painful. There are one or two gems in among a bad, bad bunch which make the show bearable, but recently (end of 2011ish) the show has been attempting to impersonate skins, one of the key shots being a direct copy of the DVD cover of the first generation, which makes it just awkward. It's brought in a bunch of new characters, all of which have intoxicatingly overdone personalities.

There are also many cringe-worthy moments where the show attempts comedy, and fails.

The show gets a 3 out of 10 for being mildly entertaining at times, and for a few crazy story lines that did get me hooked (I'm ashamed to say.) However, the writing is terrible. The acting is terrible. The plots string you along and then completely disappoint you.

Just...don't watch it.

For those of you not already in the know, Hollyoaks is part of the Mount Rushmore of best-known and most popular television soap operas in Britain alongside Emmerdale (originally titled Emmerdale Farm), EastEnders and the big daddy of them all Coronation Street. It originally aired on a half-hour weekday teatime slot on Channel 4 on 23rd October 1995 (which obviously means this time next year will be its 30th anniversary), has won several awards including only two for Best British Soap and several more for Best Young Performance, it is set in a Cheshire village called, well, Hollyoaks and basically (like with most other soap operas these days) there's no real coherent story or premise to be found in this thing. Instead, it's just random stuff happening for no particularly good rhyme or reason whatsoever other than perhaps to appeal to its younger demographic consisting of teenagers and young adults in the most desperate, creatively bankrupt and cynical way possible, heavy-handedness of themes such as gay sex, racism, homophobia, teenage pregnancies, love triangles, murder, suicide, mental health, alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence, homelessness and cancer that ultimately end up forgotten all of a sudden and/or lead up to nowhere in a way that insults audiences' intelligence profoundly as well as cheaper-than-cheap production values as if it's made on a 50p budget, laughably toothless writing that makes even George Lucas's writing of the prequels (especially for Attack of the Clones) feel like Chaucer in comparison and acting that is just so ridiculous, so over-the-top, so atrocious and so insultingly amateurish it's not even funny.

With all that being said, here's what I have to say about Hollyoaks: To say that this show has become such a miserable and depressing shadow of its former self during the last couple of years and is in such a sad and sorry existential state at the moment in terms of ratings, viewer interest and steeply declining popularity is a massive understatement. The saddest thing about me saying this though is that of the big 4 television soaps I've just mentioned, Hollyoaks is the one that I remember remotely enjoying the most when I was growing up: Yes, it's cheaply made; yes, the writing is abysmal; yes, the storylines are beyond messy and stupid and yes, the acting is so appallingly bad that even pre-schoolers can do a far better acting job but there was something about this show that appealed to me for a reason I'm really unable to pin down at least on a similar guilty-pleasure level as, say, The Jeremy Kyle Show.

Watching this show now, you almost get a sense that, like with most shows these days that go on for too long such as The Simpsons and Family Guy, Hollyoaks has run out of steam really quickly, that the writers have completely run stale and dry of ideas and that Channel 4 themselves no longer have a clue anymore what to do with the show and actually don't really seem to have learned their lesson from what happened to Brookside back in 2003.

Which actually perfectly leads me to the show's biggest problem: the writing. The writing of this show is just scraping-the-very-bottom-of-the-barrel awful. What I mean is, from the initial setup of each storyline, you instantly know which set of characters is going to be involved, which set of characters is going to be killed off and/or written out, who is going to romantically hook up with who, what motions and/or emotional struggles these characters are going to have to go through, what's going to happen to them, when it's going to happen to them, it is just ridiculous. Not to even mention the fact that you are literally given zero reason to care or be emotionally invested in these characters beyond eye candy or surface level.

And one has to feel especially bad for half of this huge cast past and present (including Nick Pickard, Ashley Taylor Dawson, Jessica Fox, Jimmy McKenna, Kieron Richardson, James Sutton, Anna Passey, Nadine Mulkerrin, Mandip Gill, Tosin Cole, Steph Waring, Will Mellor, Gary Lucy, Ellis Hollins, Ruby O'Donnell, Niamh Blackshaw, Kirsty Leigh Porter, Jennifer Metcalfe, Matt Littler, Emmett J. Scanlan, Nikki Sanderson, Annie Wallace, Ela-May Melek Demircan, Isabelle Smith, etc.) who are clearly legitimately exceptionally talented and who all clearly have the potential once they inevitably leave the show to do new and better things with their careers and are just clearly giving their all and/or are trying their very best with this horribly lazy and subpar material they are given which is so obviously beneath them and gives them little to nothing to work with. The other half of this cast, however, to put it rather bluntly, is just a bunch of over-pretentious, talentless models who want to be famous, take their clothes off, mug and/or gurn for the cameras and seem to delude themselves into believing that an appearance on the show is like an automatic audition tape for an acting job in Hollywood.

As much as I am perfectly willing to at least commend the show for being progressive, being tirelessly supportive of the LGBTQ community, its ability to tackle certain social issues as sensitively as it can, its making recent British soap history especially in a couple of key areas (i.e. The very first depiction of a non-binary autistic character in the form of Tylan Grant as Phoenix Hathaway and of course the very first casting of an actual trans actress in the form of Annie Wallace as Sally St. Claire) and even getting Doctor Who legend Graeme Harper to direct a bunch of episodes, it is really tough to deny how drastically downhill and rock-bottom Hollyoaks's public reputation has become within the last couple of years (especially when you take into account the recent unnecessary changes they've made to the quality of the show such as dramatically cutting down the number of cast members due to a reported backstage crisis, axing the show full stop from weekday teatime slot on Channel 4 yet not from its later timeslot on E4 due to terminally declining ratings and instead becoming the UK's very first exclusive digital-based soap by moving full episodes onto YouTube a full week after each original broadcast and even more recently cutting back the number of episodes from 5 a week (Monday-Friday) to just 3 a week (Monday-Wednesday)). In fact, it's almost as if Dolores Umbridge learned from her mistakes, broke out of Azkaban, infiltrated the Hollyoaks set and has basically effectively taken over the production of the show as well as run it even further into the ground

I honestly just feel depressed, deflated, disappointed and also frustrated and tired of actively trying to be angry with the show or trying to defend it even if I wanted to but here's the only best way I can finish summarising my overall thoughts on this show: The way it looks now is just beyond cheap and ugly, the direction is non-existent, the writing especially is extraordinarily horrid, a large majority of the acting is just painful to watch, the storylines are getting more and more ridiculous, insane, nonsensical and stupid by the day, the continuity is just shot up to smithereens, the grit and realism it once had is completely gone, you can clearly tell that Channel 4 no longer truly care about the show and that half of the actors involved no longer have the fun, the passion and the enthusiasm to continue with the show in its current state and actually don't want to even be there anymore and the recent time jump, in which the action now apparently takes place in the latter half of 2025 as opposed to real time (which by the way you cannot possibly see any of the other 3 soaps doing, especially EastEnders and Corrie), does nothing but completely solidify and cement everything that's gone tragically wrong with this show these last few years and may just be the final nail in the coffin of what was once a great show and, in other words, may just be the moment that Hollyoaks has officially jumped the shark.

In conclusion, the way the show is going at this point, I really honestly don't see it continuing beyond its 30th anniversary year in 2025 and it really sucks for me to say this but that's the sad reality of the situation we're dealt.

My overall rating: A generous 3/10.