Guiding Light
Guiding Light (known as The Guiding Light before 1975) is an American television soap opera. It is listed in "Guinness World Records" as the longest-running drama in television in American history, broadcast on CBS for 57 years from June 30, 1952, until September 18, 2009, overlapping a 19-year broadcast on radio from 1937 to 1956. With it 72 years of radio and television runs, "Guiding Light" is the longest running soap opera before "General Hospital" and the fifth-longest running program in all of broadcast history; only the American country music radio program "Grand Ole Opry" (first broadcast in 1925), the BBC religious program "The Daily Service" (1928), the CBS religious program "Music and the Spoken Word" (1929), and the Norwegian children's radio program "Lørdagsbarnetimen" (1924-2010) have been on the air longer.
Guiding Light
Overall, the first half of the 1980s saw a revival in "Guiding Light's" popularity, with a top-five placing achieved in most years and even a brief dethroning of then-powerhouse "General Hospital" from the #1 ratings spot for three consecutive weeks. However, as the decade progressed, the ratings slipped a bit, although it was still performing solidly. In 1995, beginning with CBS flagship station WCBS-TV in New York, "Guiding Light" began airing at 10 a.m. Eastern time in several markets. Its once-solid performance began to crumble by the mid-1990s, when its ratings sunk as low as ninth place out of ten. However, during the controversial clone storyline in 1998, the ratings experienced a brief resurgence, moving up to fifth for many weeks that summer. Nielsen reported "Guiding Light" had 5 million viewers in 1999.