When Does EastEnders Season 43 Come Out? Is It Renewed?

What is EastEnders about?

EastEnders has been running on BBC One since 1985, which means it has outlasted governments, technologies, and entire television genres. It was built on a specific idea: that working-class London life, with its cramped kitchens and market stalls and pub arguments, was as worthy of drama as anything happening in a country house or a police precinct. That instinct still matters, even if the show has drifted far from it over the decades.

The tone is relentless in a way that is both the show's greatest quality and its most exhausting habit. EastEnders does not do quiet. Every secret eventually becomes a screaming confrontation in the Queen Vic, every affair spirals into a murder investigation, every Christmas Day is catastrophic. At its best, this produces genuinely gripping television, the kind of thing people talk about at work the next morning. At its worst, it produces storylines so contrived that the show seems to be running against itself. The long-running cast members are what hold it together, because audiences have watched some of these characters for twenty or thirty years and that investment is real regardless of what the writers put them through.

Critical reception has been mixed for most of its history, and the IMDb score of 4.8 reflects a particular kind of online audience that tends to vote on frustration rather than affection. British viewers have a complicated relationship with EastEnders: many watch it out of habit as much as enthusiasm, and complaints about the writing are practically a national tradition. It has had genuine cultural moments, though, episodes and storylines that became part of the broader conversation in a way that very few dramas manage.

Compared to Coronation Street, its oldest rival, EastEnders has always been the darker and more socially ambitious of the two, quicker to take on difficult subject matter, sometimes to its credit and sometimes just for shock value. After more than seven thousand episodes, the show's relationship with its own history is both its richest resource and its heaviest burden.

Created by Julia Smith, Tony Holland

Is EastEnders renewed or cancelled?

EastEnders Season 43 Release Date

Best & worst episodes

EastEnders seasons