The Young and the Restless
The Young and the Restless (often abbreviated as Y&R) is an American television soap opera created by William J. Bell and Lee Phillip Bell for CBS. The show is set in a fictionalized version of Genoa City, Wisconsin. First broadcast on March 26, 1973, "The Young and the Restless" was originally broadcast as half-hour episodes, five times a week. The show expanded to one-hour episodes on February 4, 1980. In 2006, the series began airing encore episodes weeknights on SOAPnet until 2013, when it moved to TVGN (now Pop). As of July 1, 2013, Pop still airs the encore episodes on weeknights. The series is also syndicated internationally.
The Young and the Restless storylines
"The Young and the Restless" co-creator William J. Bell originally conceived the show to center around the class conflict between two core families: the wealthy Brooks and the poor Fosters. Newspaper publisher Stuart Brooks (played by Robert Colbert) and his socialite wife Jennifer (Dorothy Green) had four daughters: Leslie (Janice Lynde), a pianist; Lauralee "Lorie" (Jaime Lyn Bauer), an author; Christabel "Chris" (Trish Stewart), a journalist; and Peggy (Pamela Peters Solow), a college student. Meanwhile, Elizabeth "Liz" Foster (Julianna McCarthy) was a factory worker and single parent who, after being abandoned by her husband William "Bill" Sr. (Charles H. Gray), was struggling to make ends meet while trying to raise three children: William "Snapper" Jr. (played at first by William Grey Espy, then by David Hasselhoff), a medical student; Greg (James Houghton), a law student; and Jill (Brenda Dickson; later Bond Gideon, Deborah Adair, and currently Jess Walton), a beautician and aspiring model.