Five families, one invented town, and more than three decades of Dutch weeknights. Goede tijden, slechte tijden, or GTST to everyone who watches it, began on RTL 4 on 1 October 1990 and became the first daily soap produced in the Netherlands, and the first in Europe. More than 7,000 episodes have gone out since.

The setting is Meerdijk, a town that exists only on this programme, where the Alberts, Sanders, De Jong, Van Houten and Bouwhuis families run businesses, marry into one another and fall out again. Joop van den Ende produced it. The first seasons adapted scripts from the Australian serial The Restless Years; from the third season the writers worked from original material, and the show settled into Dutch concerns and a Dutch rhythm. Gay and lesbian storylines have run through it for years, one sign of a serial that keeps pace with the country outside it.

For an outsider, the scale matters more than any single storyline. GTST went out Monday to Friday at 20:00 for decades, so Dutch households built the start of the evening around it, and the cast list reads as a directory of familiar television faces: Ferry Doedens, Ruud Feltkamp, Gigi Ravelli, Inge Schrama, Pip Pellens, Christophe Haddad. Since March 2020 it airs Monday to Thursday, and Videoland has carried it on demand since 2015.