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
To compete with the youthful ABC soap operas, "All My Children", "One Life to Live", and "General Hospital", CBS executives wanted a new daytime serial that was youth oriented. William J. Bell and Lee Phillip Bell created "The Young and the Restless" in 1972 for the network under the working title, "The Innocent Years!" "We were confronted with the very disturbing reality that young America had lost much of its innocence," Bell said. "Innocence as we had known and lived it all our lives had, in so many respects, ceased to exist." They changed the title of the series to "The Young and the Restless" because they felt it "reflected the youth and mood of the early seventies." The Bells named the fictional setting for the show after the real Genoa City, Wisconsin, which was located on their way from their then-home in Chicago to their annual summer vacation spot in Lake Geneva.