a need for dramatic love stories (on EastEnders and Austen)

Is it sad that I get upset when the BBC takes down the episodes of EASTENDERS (the famous British soap opera) from Youtube that people illegally upload? Yeah, it probably is. But I really like that show. Got hooked on it when I lived in London, and it is so much better than American soaps, mostly because it deals with real people and real situations, although of course rather heightened as is the need for soap operas. But it makes me happy to watch the thirty minute episodes that air Mon, Tuesday, Thurs, and Friday. I don't have much to look forward to right now. I like knowing that I will have a cup of tea and my soap opera to watch. I think even if I had "a life" -- that is a job, even a boyfriend -- I would still very much desire this. Maybe not as much as I do now, as I wake from another day without a job, what money I do have quickly dwindling away, and worry about my ever-sickening parents on my mind. On the show a character the same age as me named Stacey Branning indirectly encouraged me to seek help about my anxiety and depression. Her story line was one of abuse and eventual downward spiral to anxiety and depression and she was as reluctant to seek pills to help her as I have been. But on the show she did and seeing how she dealt with her situation inclined me to do the same. I don't know why I should rely on fictional characters more than I do real people who have gone through these situations. I suppose because real people usually feel the need to tell you what is best, rather than discreetly showing you through support.

But I meant to post this. A short excerpt from Harold Bloom's forward in the book A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers On Why We Read Jane Austen. (It is rather annoying how EVERY book about Jane Austen has to start with A truth universally acknowledged... the famous opening line from Austen's most famous, although perhaps not best written, book Pride and Prejudice. [Emma is considered by many to be her greatest].)

There is a tendency to over evaluate novels in academic circles and I think out of any writer it is a misfortune to do this to Austen. Bloom brilliantly elaborates:

Austen has no more a political or social agenda than she has a religious one. To read the heroines' stories well, you need to acquire a touch of Austen's own wisdom, because she was a wise as Dr. Samuel Johnson. Like Johnson, though far more implicitly, Austen urges us to clear our mind of "cant." "Cant," in the Johnsonian sense, means platitudes, pious expressions, groupthink. Austen has no use for it, and neither should we. Those who now read Austen "politically" are not reading her at all...We read Austen because she seems to know us better than we know ourselves, and she seems to know us so intimately for the simple reason that she helped determine who we are both as readers and as human beings.