Soap opera only lasted one year. Nevertheless, soap operas gained increasing prominence on UK television schedules. In 1995, Channel 4 premiered "Hollyoaks", a soap with a youth focus. When Channel 5 launched in March 1997, it debuted the soap opera "Family Affairs", which was formatted as a week-daily soap, airing Monday through Fridays. "Brookside"s premise evolved during the 1990s, phasing out the politicised stories of the 1980s and shifting the emphasis to controversial and sensationalist stories such as child rape, sibling incest, religious cults and drug addiction, including the infamous 'body under the patio' storyline that ran from 1993 to 1995, and
Soap opera oil boom, premiering on September 27, 2015 during the 2015-16 TV season. The telenovela, a shorter-form format of serial melodrama, shares some thematic and especially stylistic similarity to the soap opera, enough that the colloquialism "Spanish soap opera" has arisen to describe the format. The chief difference between the two is length of series; while soap operas usually have indefinite runs, telenovelas typically have a central story arc with a prescribed ending within a year or two of the show's launch, requiring more concise storytelling. Spanish-language networks, chiefly Univision and Telemundo, have found success airing telenovelas for the growing U.S.