Train and Nation: 'CityExpress' -- The Soap Opera.

This article focuses on the soap opera "CityExpress." It represents a search for differentiation and innovation in the ever-expanding market of television series on German television. Launched with a publicity campaign costing four million marks, its first episode was broadcast on ARD, national public radio and television network of the Federal Republic of Germany, the larger of the two German public broadcasting channels, on February 18, 1999. The series ran until the end of that year. CiryExpress is set on a train which travels between three termini in Germany. The series follows the lives of a number of stock characters, the majority of whom belong to the train's service team, working as conductors or in the dining car and bar. The program's central character is the Chief Conductor, Hannah Fink, whose difficult love life constitutes the major long-running and unresolved plot line. Each weekly episode features a self-contained plot involving characters who, as passengers on the train, only appear in that week's episode. Soap opera, like any popular cultural form, is subject to the conventions and constraints of the marketplace. In search of wider and more prime-time audiences, the genre has become more diverse in recent years, making it difficult to distinguish between soap operas and series in terms of their major genre characteristics.