Ooooooooooooooh, I created a topic and didn't even realise
As for pacing, I'd agree with the VCR thing, which I think still applies to soaps. Most regular viewers of a soap will probably only watch three episodes out of a week's block of five, and a good story editor will consider that when they are developing their stories.
With DS' final year, so many of the A.D.S. stories require viewers to not only have watched, but also
remembered past episodes, which IMO is asking too much of the regular audience - we all duck off from watching shows to answer the phone or make coffee or whatever... A mass-market show simply has to make concessions for that part of the audience. It can't afford not to.
I'm not bought on the argument that all TV is being degraded into MTV-esque pap. Soaps -- certainly in the UK and Australia -- have seen more evolution is the last decade or so than any other programming genre, and I think a lot of the speedier pacing has more to do with the audience becoming more television literate than anything else. DS is very theatrical rather than televisual -- most of the writing is basically theatre or radio that just happens to be put on videotape, very rarely do you get outright visual storytelling. Nowadays, the audience is clued to "read" the text with far more sophistication -- one well-placed close-up reaction shot can do the work of a whole page of dialogue, for instance.
As Robert McKee puts it, a writer's ideal is "good stories told well". Any producer of a new DS would do well to remember that the stories are only half of the deal.