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
Due to the success of the series, CBS and their affiliates pressured Bell to lengthen the series from 30 minutes to a full hour. Bell attributed this change to the show's fall from number one in the Nielsen ratings, since the lengthening of the show led to the departure of a number of cast members. "The issue of performing in a one-hour show had not been part of their contracts," Bell said. This forced the show to recast multiple main characters and eventually phase out the original core families in favor of new ones. The show expanded to one hour on February 4, 1980. It airs at 11:00am on most stations in the Central, Mountain and Pacific time zones, usually as a lead-in to the local noon news for most CBS stations in those regions (though some stations in the Central Time Zone opt to air it at 11:30am). It airs at 12:30pm Eastern.