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
In the 1990s, core black characters were introduced with the Barber and Winters families. Victoria Rowell (Drucilla Barber) and Tonya Lee Williams (Dr. Olivia Barber) were cast as the nieces of the Abbott's maid, Mamie Johnson, in 1990. The brothers Neil (Kristoff St. John) and Malcolm Winters (Shemar Moore) were introduced as love interests for Olivia and Drucilla. "The Young and the Restless" became popular among black viewers, which Williams and St. John attributed to the writing for the black characters. "I play a CEO at a major corporation, that's something we don't see that often," St. John said. "And the show doesn't use the old African-American stereotypes that we have been seeing on TV, like the hustler, the pimp, the drug dealer. We have come a long way." Though the characters held prominent positions in the fictional work place of Genoa City, they had little interaction with other characters outside of their jobs.