The Young and the Restless

The newest Young and the Restless logo, which was first seen in early 2003.

The Young and the Restless (commonly abbreviated to Y&R) is an American soap opera that takes place in Genoa City, Wisconsin. It first debuted on the CBS television network on March 26, 1973, replacing Where the Heart Is and Love is a Many Splendored Thing. Y&R has aired over eight thousand episodes.

Since late 1988, the show has been the highest-rated serial in the daytime ratings. Like all the other soaps, however, The Young and the Restless has seen the ratings decline steadily since it first ranked #1. From 1988 to 2004, the show has lost more than 25% of its audience, from eight million viewers to less than six.

History

The Young and the Restless, created by husband and wife team William J. Bell and Lee Phillip Bell stood out from other soaps on the air for its brightness, both literal and figurative. Soap operas at the time tended to be comparatively darkly-lit and lugubrious in tone. The Young and the Restless infused light, humor and youth into the genre. In its early years, The Young and the Restless centered around the Foster and Brooks families. William and Elizabeth Foster had three children: Snapper, Greg, and Jill. Stuart and Jennifer Brooks had four daughters: Leslie, Chris, Peggy, and Lauralee (nicknamed Lorie; her father would turn out to be Elizabeth Foster's brother, Bruce Henderson). At the core of the show was a class struggle: the Brooks family was rich while the Fosters were poor. The young cast was derided by some soap fans, who mocked the show by calling it "The Young and the Chestless".

Gradually, the focus shifted from the Brooks and Foster families to the Newman and Abbott families and around their respective companies, Newman Enterprises and Jabot Cosmetics. The key to the show winning the ratings week after week is due in part to the tight-knit writing and production staff. For the most part, the writers and producers of the show have stayed unchanged since the 1980s. The writers, in turn, have involved the same fan favorite characters (with few exceptions) in the storylines du jour. The writers of the show found their niche in the stories surrounding the Newman and Jabot conglomerates, and focused on the problems in the relationships stemming from the business deals and love lives of its principal members.

The Y&R mid-program bumper, coinciding with the 2004 daytime campaign, The Look That's Got You Hooked. The eyes in this picture are those of Sharon Case.

The Young and the Restless is also one of the few soaps to have successfully integrated a number of African American actors into its cast. The introduction of the Winters family and the Barber sisters in the early 1990s interacted fairly well with the established characters when given the dialogue and the situations to do so. The new characters were created after Generations earned critical acclaim for casting an entire African American family from the show's inception. Established hits like The Young and the Restless were criticized as the show had a low number of minorities (the Barber sisters, for example, were tied to one of the two black characters on the show at the time: the Abbott maid, Mamie Johnson, played by Veronica Redd. The other character, Nathan Hastings, was married off to Barber sister Olivia).

Critics of Y&R continued to deride the show even after its integration, noting that, most of the time, the core black characters largely interacted with themselves only. In the case of Winters siblings Neil and Malcolm, and Barber sisters Olivia and Drucilla, they were shown to usually just swap partners when a "shake-up" was needed in the romantic scheme of the story. Later actions have proven that this choice was due to the supposition that it was ostensibly "too controversial" to have an interracial pairing. Indeed, a pairing in the late 1990s between Neil Winters and Victoria Newman was axed by CBS executives, who were rumored to have received many angry phone calls and letters by viewers in the South. Currently, a love affair between web designer Phyllis Abbott (Michelle Stafford) and chemist Damon Porter (Keith Hamilton Cobb) has been prominently featured, despite concerns that the interracial pairing would be scrapped just like the one that was written before.

The theme song has become iconic; save for a three-year stint in the early 2000s, the melody has remained unchanged. The theme music, composed by soap songwriter Barry DeVorzon, was not originally written for the series. It originated as a piece of incidental music for the 1971 theatrical film Bless the Beasts & Children called "Cotton's Dream". DeVorzon adapted this piece of music as the theme to The Young and the Restless. It would later be used as accompanying music during Nadia Comaneci's floor exercises at the 1976 Summer Olympics, and given the alternate title "Nadia's Theme". It was sampled in Mary J. Blige's song No More Drama. In the tune, Blige's persona describes herself as "young and restless".

The opening sequence has also become well-known. For many years, the opening showcased the characters, drawn by an artist, on a white background. Over time, the drawings were replaced with live-action shots of the characters, still on a white background. The opening traditionally ended with an interlocking Y and R painted on the white canvas in a sweeping brush motion. The logo (and in the earlier years, the drawings) were done by artist Sandy Dvore.

Beginning in 1999, in an unprecedented move for a main title sequence of a daytime soap opera, the names of the principal cast members (for that day's particular episode) were mentioned (whereas previously the main title only showed the cast members' faces). For the most part, the mentality of the soap opera producers in general is to keep a certain image of a soap opera character or actor constant in order to keep good publicity, and thus the real names of the actors, shown next to their pictures, were long discouraged, as it interfered with the "escapist" tone of the genre.

It is, to date, the only daytime soap opera on American television with such a main title sequence, although Mexican/Spanish-language television has for decades opened their soap operas (or novellas) with the names of the actors in the main title credits.

Longtime characters

The following characters have been on Y&R for a number of years, and even though some of them are not on the show anymore, their previous presence in Genoa City is still felt on the show today.

The Newmans

• Victor Newman (played by Eric Braeden) - wealthy, powerful and brooding industrialist
• Nikki Reed Newman (Melody Thomas Scott) - Victor's on-again off-again wife and one great, true love
• Nick Newman (Joshua Morrow) - Victor and Nikki's son
• Victoria Newman (played from 1991 to 2003 by Heather Tom) - Victor and Nikki's daughter
• Ryan McNeil (played from 1991 to 2001 by Scott Reeves) - Victoria's "one true love". At the center of a love triangle between Victoria and Nina and later Victoria and Tricia (Sabryn Genet).
• Sharon Collins Newman (Sharon Case) - Nick's wife

The Abbotts

• John Abbott (Jerry Douglas) - Aging patriarch of the Abbott clan. Jabot co-executive
• Jack Abbott (Peter Bergman) - Victor's greatest rival and enemy, Jabot executive
• Phyllis Summers Abbott (Michelle Stafford) - Somewhat-reformed ex-wife of Jack Abbott; previously married to Danny Romalotti
• Ashley Abbott (Eileen Davidson) - Jack's chemist sister, board member of Jabot, and one of Victor's ex-wives
• Brad Carlton (Don Diamont) - a Jabot executive, Ashley's current husband
• Jill Foster Abbott (Jess Walton) - Jack and Ashley's stepmother
• Billy Abbott (most notably played by David Tom) - Jill's husband's son

The Chancellors

• Katherine "Kay" Chancellor (Jeanne Cooper) - Jill's longtime rival
• Brock Reynolds (Beau Kayzer) - Katherine's long-lost son
• Mackenzie Reynolds (most notably played by Ashley Bashioum) - Katherine's long-lost granddaughter, Brock's daughter
• Nina Webster Chancellor (played from 1986 to 2001 by Tricia Cast) - unwed teenage mother, was married to Katherine's grandson Phillip, who died in a drunk-driving accident. Best friends, later adversaries, and friends again with Cricket.

The Williamses and Others

• Paul Williams (Doug Davidson) - Chris's former husband, a private investigator
• Mary Williams (Carolyn Conwell) - Paul's meddling, judgmental mother
• Christine "Cricket" Blair (Lauralee Bell) - Legal aid lawyer and former model. Wife to Danny, then Paul.
• Danny Romalotti (Michael Damian) - Former breakout rock star. Husband to Christine and Phyllis.
• Gina Roma (Patty Weaver) - Danny's older sister. Used to run Gina's, a much-frequented restaurant in Genoa City, but Kevin Fisher burned it down.
• Michael Baldwin (Christian LeBlanc) - lawyer and former lover of both Chris and Phyllis
• Lynne Bassett (Laura Bryan Birn) - Paul's secretary, who insisted on referring to Paul only as "Boss".

The Winters/Barbers

• Malcolm Winters (Shemar Moore) - photographer for Newman Enterprises. Was presumed dead but came back two years after "disappearing" in Africa.
• Olivia Barber Hastings Winters (Tonya Lee Williams) - A doctor, she was Malcolm's wife after her marriage to Nathan was dissolved
• Nathan Hastings (most notably played by Nathan Purdee from 1985 to 1992) - Olivia's husband, eventually died from AIDS.
• Neil Winters (Kristoff St. John) - Malcolm's brother, Newman Enterprises executive
• Drucilla Barber Winters (Victoria Rowell) - Neil's tart-tongued wife. Street urchin who was taught to read by Nathan Hastings. Eventually bettered herself into a fashion model, and later an employee at Jabot.

External sites

• Soapcity - Young and the Restless (http://www.soapcity.com/yr/index2.html)

Warning: At this site, there are spoilers for non-American viewers. Your current airdates may be behind those of America's.

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