we have a Bold & Beautiful thread, so i thought it was time we should have a topic for its older sister soap, which also happens to be my alltime favorite soap (featuring my alltime favorite character, the psychotic Sheila Carter).
There's something about this show i have always been passionate about. Everything, from the 'look' of the show, wonderful sets, terrific lighting, Shakespearean/Dickens type themes, compelling plots with great use of the soap's history and above all, multi faceted characters who all are pretty sophisticated.
Sure, it may not be real life like British soaps and focuses of American upper middle class characters, but it does touch on real issues.
For anyone unfamiliar with the soap, here's some background:
The Young and the Restless (commonly abbreviated to Y&R) is an American soap opera that takes place in Genoa City, Wisconsin (named after a vacation spot that series creators William J. Bell and Lee Phillip Bell visited annually). It first debuted on the CBS television network on March 26, 1973, replacing Where the Heart Is and Love is a Many Splendored Thing. Y&R has aired over eight thousand episodes.
Since late 1988, the show has been the highest-rated serial in the daytime ratings.
PRODUCTION AND WRITING
The key to the show winning the ratings week after week is due in part to the tight-knit writing and production staff. For the most part, the writers and producers of the show have stayed unchanged since the 1980s, with the only high-profile departure being William J. Bell himself, who retired from writing the program in 1998 after twenty-five years — although Bell stayed closely involved with the series, serving as executive producer and story consultant until his death in 2005.
The writers, in turn, have involved the same fan favorite characters (with few exceptions) in the storylines du jour. These long-term characters, in most cases, have been played by the same actor since their introduction, allowing viewers to invest not only in character but actor, as well. Even actors that took over long term roles from their original portrayers have managed to carve their own niche in the roles (notably Jess Walton, Peter Bergman and Susan Walters).
The writers of the show found their niche in the stories surrounding the Newman Enterprises and Jabot Cosmetics conglomerates, and focused on the problems in the relationships stemming from the business deals and love lives of its principal members. The show was twice nominated for a WGA Award for best written daytime serial and won it once, in 2003.
HISTORY
The Young and the Restless stood out from other soaps on the air for its brightness, both literal and figurative. Soap operas at the time tended to be comparatively darkly-lit and lugubrious in tone. The Young and the Restless infused light, humor and youth into the genre. In its early years, The Young and the Restless centered around the Foster and Brooks families. William and Elizabeth Foster had three children: Snapper, Greg, and Jill. Stuart and Jennifer Brooks had four daughters: Leslie, Chris, Peggy, and Lauralee (nicknamed Lorie and played by Jaime Lyn Bauer; her father would turn out to be Elizabeth Foster's brother, Bruce Henderson). At the core of the show was a class struggle: the Brooks family was rich while the Fosters were poor. The young cast was derided by some soap fans, who mocked the show by calling it "The Young and the Chestless". Leslie and Lorie fought over first Brad Eliot and then Lance Prentiss, a triangle stretched into four when Lance's sea captain brother Lucas arrived.
One of Y&R's first and longest-lasting storylines involved the rivalry between Katherine Chancellor (Jeanne Cooper) and Jill Foster (Jess Walton). In 1973 Jill (then played by Brenda Dickson ) went to work as Kay's personal secretary to help her struggling family pay the bills. Kay was a boozy matron trapped in a loveless marriage to Phillip Chancellor (Donnelly Rhodes). Jill and Phillip fell in love but when Phillip and Kay were on their way to get a divorce, Kay crashed the car (with decades of speculation on whether she did so intentionally). Phillip, on his deathbed, married Jill and bequeathed her and their child Phillip III his fortune, but Kay successfully contested his decision. An embittered Jill (then Brenda Dickson) became a vixen and the two ladies fought over beautician Derek Thurston. Jill then married tycoon John Abbott (Jerry Douglas) while Kay went through groundbreaking stories about alcoholism and facelifts. Years later Jill, after her 2 marriages to John were over and her son Phillip was dead from a car crash, went back to court and the judge declared she owned half of the Chancellor mansion. Jill and Kay fought over the new arrangement as well as Jill's son Billy dating Kay's granddaughter Mackenzie. In 2003 Jill discovered that Katherine was her birth mother, and told Billy and Mac moments before they consummated their relationship. In 2004 Jill's birth father Arthur (David Hedison) briefly visited, and mother and daughter fought over him while Kay again battled her drinking problem.
Although Lorie Brooks was initially little more than the bad girl who tormented pure sister Leslie, she became a lead in her own right as she battled her sister over custody of Leslie's son Brooks, and battled her psychotic mother-in-law Vanessa (who even killed herself just to frame Lorie for the crime). Lorie acted and reacted based on her neuroses and was as much a child as a woman, naughty as well as sympathetic, a template for many future Y&R female leads. Most of the Brooks and Foster families had been recast again and again by the early 80's, and when Bell decided to expand Y&R to an hour in 1980, many lead actors said they could not sustain themselves on an hour show. Bell told himself he would wait for one more major departure before making big changes. When Jaime Lyn Bauer quit in 1982 due to exhaustion, Bell took the opportunity to write out all of the Brooks and Fosters, save Jill. Gradually, the focus shifted from the Brooks and Foster families to the Williams, Newman and Abbott families and around their respective companies, Newman Enterprises and Jabot Cosmetics. Most of the Williams family have been phased out but the other two families remain. Y&R is one of the only shows in the history of daytime to eliminate their original core families and benefit from the result.
Around the same time Bell phased out the originals, Eric Braeden arrived as the sinister tycoon Victor Newman who was so menacing to his wife Julia (Meg Bennett) that he locked her boyfriend in a dungeon and forced him to watch Victor and Julia's bedroom via closed-circuit camera. Bell saw something in Braeden's performance and since the show had few strong male characters, elevated him to star status. Soon after, Victor went to a strip club and met brash yet innocent Nikki Reed. Nikki had gone through a number of second-tier stories (killing her rapist dad, getting an STD from Paul Williams, joining a cult) but as played by Melody Thomas Scott was a naughty antiheroine in the Lorie Brooks mold. She married Victor in a lavish 1984 wedding and their love-hate relationship suffered many divorces, affairs and remarriages involving everyone from Abbotts to blind Kansas farm women to gynecologists. After over a decade apart, they reunited in 1998 and have basically been together since.
The Young and the Restless is also one of the few soaps to have successfully integrated a number of African American actors into its cast. In the mid-80's Y&R created a storyline which revolved around a young black man being made up in whiteface to bring down a mafia kingpin, but the characters were written out within a few years. The introduction of the Winters family and the Barber sisters in the early 1990s interacted fairly well with the established characters when given the dialogue and the situations to do so. The new characters were created after Generations earned critical acclaim for casting an entire African American family from the show's inception. Established hits like The Young and the Restless were criticized as the show had a low number of minorities (the Barber sisters, for example, were tied to one of the two black characters on the show at the time: the Abbott maid, Mamie Johnson, played by Margeurite Ray, then Veronica Redd. The other character, Nathan Hastings, was married off to Barber sister Olivia (Tonya Lee Williams) before dying in a hit and run in 1996).
Critics of Y&R continued to deride the show even after its integration, noting that, most of the time, the core black characters largely interacted with themselves only. In the case of Winters siblings Neil (Kristoff St. John) and Malcolm (Shemar Moore), and Barber sisters Olivia and Drucilla (Victoria Rowell), they were shown to usually just swap each other's partners when a "shake-up" was needed in the romantic scheme of the story, leading to a seemingly neverending love quadrangle between the four characters that gained the nickname "Four Square" from fans and critics alike. Later actions have proven that this choice was due to the supposition that it was ostensibly "too controversial" to have an interracial pairing. Indeed, a pairing in the late 1990s between Neil Winters and Victoria Newman was axed by CBS executives, who were rumored to have received many angry phone calls and letters by viewers in the South. In 2004, a love affair between web designer Phyllis Abbott (Michelle Stafford) and chemist Damon Porter (Keith Hamilton Cobb) was prominently featured, despite concerns that the interracial pairing would be scrapped just like the one that was written before.
Unlike other soaps in the 80's or 90's, Y&R avoided preachy social issues. When they did touch on such issues as abortion or the homeless crisis or AIDS, it was only as a plot device with a few facts and statistics thrown in for effect. For instance, when Ashley Abbott (Eileen Davidson) aborted Victor's child in the 80's, any viewers or scholars who may have looked for a serious story on the pros and cons of abortion would have been disappointed. Ashley only aborted her baby because her lover Victor's wife, Nikki, was then-terminally ill, and Ashley did not want to cause her pain. After learning of her abortion, Victor ripped her to shreds, causing a devastated Ashley to lose her mind and wind up in an insane asylum (in true soap fashion, she married her psychiatrist).
CROSSOVERS
The Bells created The Bold and the Beautiful in 1987, and in 1992, the mega-popular Y&R villainess Sheila Carter (Kimberlin Brown) crossed over to B&B's Los Angeles setting. Bill Bell felt the character had committed too many crimes for her to remain in Genoa City, so she faked her death and moved to LA. She married Eric Forrester (John McCook, who was the first Lance Prentiss) and continually worried her identity would be exposed by her archnemesis Lauren Fenmore (Tracey E. Bregman), whose department store chain kept her in close contact with the Forresters. Lauren's dying husband, Scott Grainger (Peter Barton) also appeared on B&B long enough to forgive Sheila for her misdeeds. The crossovers were extremely successful and gained B&B over a million viewers. Lauren moved permanently to B&B in 1995 and stayed on the show off and on until 2000, when she again fit into the Genoa City canvas.
In 1995 Jeanne Cooper, Heather Tom, Melody Thomas Scott, J. Eddie Peck, Kristoff St. John, Eric Braeden, and Doug Davidson guested as themselves on primetime drama Diagnosis Murder. In the episode, Dr. Amanda Bentley (Victoria Rowell) won a small role on the set of Y&R, then helped solve a murder. As Rowell also appeared on Y&R (as Drucilla), there were a number of mistaken identity jokes, culminating in a scene where Amanda "met" Rowell.
In 1997, the family on the sitcom The Nanny traveled to Los Angeles, and met various cast members, including Melody Thomas Scott, Peter Bergman and Joshua Morrow, as well as B&B's Hunter Tylo, who played themselves. Eric Braeden also appeared in a guest role as a theatre critic in The Nanny's first season.
In 1999, Victor met man-hungry exec Brooke Logan (Katherine Kelly Lang) in LA and helped her make Ridge Forrester (Ronn Moss) jealous. In return, Brooke appeared on Y&R to pitch her "Brooke's Bedroom" lingerie line to Jack Abbott.
In 2001, select cast members of the series crossed over to The King of Queens. In an episode of the Kevin James sitcom, Doug Heffernan (James) dreams about the series. His wife Carrie (Leah Remini) dumps Doug for Jack Abbott, and Arthur Spooner (Jerry Stiller) searches for a secret antiaging cream that Nikki Newman has in her possession.
In 2005, Michael Baldwin (Christian LeBlanc) crossed over to As the World Turns to outcome the wrath of Julia Larrabee's murder in the courtroom trial.
In 2005, Eric Forrester(John McCook) crossed over to The Young and the Restless for a brief appearance.
In 2004, Lauren Fenmore's mother, Joanna(played by Susan Seaforth Hayes from Days Of Our Lives), appeared on The Bold And The Beautiful.
On October 31, 2005, Jeanne Cooper crossed over to B&B to meet with Massimo Marone and Stephanie Forrester.
Last edited by AdamArmand : 05-11-2005 at 22:43
There's something about this show i have always been passionate about. Everything, from the 'look' of the show, wonderful sets, terrific lighting, Shakespearean/Dickens type themes, compelling plots with great use of the soap's history and above all, multi faceted characters who all are pretty sophisticated.
Sure, it may not be real life like British soaps and focuses of American upper middle class characters, but it does touch on real issues.
For anyone unfamiliar with the soap, here's some background:
The Young and the Restless (commonly abbreviated to Y&R) is an American soap opera that takes place in Genoa City, Wisconsin (named after a vacation spot that series creators William J. Bell and Lee Phillip Bell visited annually). It first debuted on the CBS television network on March 26, 1973, replacing Where the Heart Is and Love is a Many Splendored Thing. Y&R has aired over eight thousand episodes.
Since late 1988, the show has been the highest-rated serial in the daytime ratings.
PRODUCTION AND WRITING
The key to the show winning the ratings week after week is due in part to the tight-knit writing and production staff. For the most part, the writers and producers of the show have stayed unchanged since the 1980s, with the only high-profile departure being William J. Bell himself, who retired from writing the program in 1998 after twenty-five years — although Bell stayed closely involved with the series, serving as executive producer and story consultant until his death in 2005.
The writers, in turn, have involved the same fan favorite characters (with few exceptions) in the storylines du jour. These long-term characters, in most cases, have been played by the same actor since their introduction, allowing viewers to invest not only in character but actor, as well. Even actors that took over long term roles from their original portrayers have managed to carve their own niche in the roles (notably Jess Walton, Peter Bergman and Susan Walters).
The writers of the show found their niche in the stories surrounding the Newman Enterprises and Jabot Cosmetics conglomerates, and focused on the problems in the relationships stemming from the business deals and love lives of its principal members. The show was twice nominated for a WGA Award for best written daytime serial and won it once, in 2003.
HISTORY
The Young and the Restless stood out from other soaps on the air for its brightness, both literal and figurative. Soap operas at the time tended to be comparatively darkly-lit and lugubrious in tone. The Young and the Restless infused light, humor and youth into the genre. In its early years, The Young and the Restless centered around the Foster and Brooks families. William and Elizabeth Foster had three children: Snapper, Greg, and Jill. Stuart and Jennifer Brooks had four daughters: Leslie, Chris, Peggy, and Lauralee (nicknamed Lorie and played by Jaime Lyn Bauer; her father would turn out to be Elizabeth Foster's brother, Bruce Henderson). At the core of the show was a class struggle: the Brooks family was rich while the Fosters were poor. The young cast was derided by some soap fans, who mocked the show by calling it "The Young and the Chestless". Leslie and Lorie fought over first Brad Eliot and then Lance Prentiss, a triangle stretched into four when Lance's sea captain brother Lucas arrived.
One of Y&R's first and longest-lasting storylines involved the rivalry between Katherine Chancellor (Jeanne Cooper) and Jill Foster (Jess Walton). In 1973 Jill (then played by Brenda Dickson ) went to work as Kay's personal secretary to help her struggling family pay the bills. Kay was a boozy matron trapped in a loveless marriage to Phillip Chancellor (Donnelly Rhodes). Jill and Phillip fell in love but when Phillip and Kay were on their way to get a divorce, Kay crashed the car (with decades of speculation on whether she did so intentionally). Phillip, on his deathbed, married Jill and bequeathed her and their child Phillip III his fortune, but Kay successfully contested his decision. An embittered Jill (then Brenda Dickson) became a vixen and the two ladies fought over beautician Derek Thurston. Jill then married tycoon John Abbott (Jerry Douglas) while Kay went through groundbreaking stories about alcoholism and facelifts. Years later Jill, after her 2 marriages to John were over and her son Phillip was dead from a car crash, went back to court and the judge declared she owned half of the Chancellor mansion. Jill and Kay fought over the new arrangement as well as Jill's son Billy dating Kay's granddaughter Mackenzie. In 2003 Jill discovered that Katherine was her birth mother, and told Billy and Mac moments before they consummated their relationship. In 2004 Jill's birth father Arthur (David Hedison) briefly visited, and mother and daughter fought over him while Kay again battled her drinking problem.
Although Lorie Brooks was initially little more than the bad girl who tormented pure sister Leslie, she became a lead in her own right as she battled her sister over custody of Leslie's son Brooks, and battled her psychotic mother-in-law Vanessa (who even killed herself just to frame Lorie for the crime). Lorie acted and reacted based on her neuroses and was as much a child as a woman, naughty as well as sympathetic, a template for many future Y&R female leads. Most of the Brooks and Foster families had been recast again and again by the early 80's, and when Bell decided to expand Y&R to an hour in 1980, many lead actors said they could not sustain themselves on an hour show. Bell told himself he would wait for one more major departure before making big changes. When Jaime Lyn Bauer quit in 1982 due to exhaustion, Bell took the opportunity to write out all of the Brooks and Fosters, save Jill. Gradually, the focus shifted from the Brooks and Foster families to the Williams, Newman and Abbott families and around their respective companies, Newman Enterprises and Jabot Cosmetics. Most of the Williams family have been phased out but the other two families remain. Y&R is one of the only shows in the history of daytime to eliminate their original core families and benefit from the result.
Around the same time Bell phased out the originals, Eric Braeden arrived as the sinister tycoon Victor Newman who was so menacing to his wife Julia (Meg Bennett) that he locked her boyfriend in a dungeon and forced him to watch Victor and Julia's bedroom via closed-circuit camera. Bell saw something in Braeden's performance and since the show had few strong male characters, elevated him to star status. Soon after, Victor went to a strip club and met brash yet innocent Nikki Reed. Nikki had gone through a number of second-tier stories (killing her rapist dad, getting an STD from Paul Williams, joining a cult) but as played by Melody Thomas Scott was a naughty antiheroine in the Lorie Brooks mold. She married Victor in a lavish 1984 wedding and their love-hate relationship suffered many divorces, affairs and remarriages involving everyone from Abbotts to blind Kansas farm women to gynecologists. After over a decade apart, they reunited in 1998 and have basically been together since.
The Young and the Restless is also one of the few soaps to have successfully integrated a number of African American actors into its cast. In the mid-80's Y&R created a storyline which revolved around a young black man being made up in whiteface to bring down a mafia kingpin, but the characters were written out within a few years. The introduction of the Winters family and the Barber sisters in the early 1990s interacted fairly well with the established characters when given the dialogue and the situations to do so. The new characters were created after Generations earned critical acclaim for casting an entire African American family from the show's inception. Established hits like The Young and the Restless were criticized as the show had a low number of minorities (the Barber sisters, for example, were tied to one of the two black characters on the show at the time: the Abbott maid, Mamie Johnson, played by Margeurite Ray, then Veronica Redd. The other character, Nathan Hastings, was married off to Barber sister Olivia (Tonya Lee Williams) before dying in a hit and run in 1996).
Critics of Y&R continued to deride the show even after its integration, noting that, most of the time, the core black characters largely interacted with themselves only. In the case of Winters siblings Neil (Kristoff St. John) and Malcolm (Shemar Moore), and Barber sisters Olivia and Drucilla (Victoria Rowell), they were shown to usually just swap each other's partners when a "shake-up" was needed in the romantic scheme of the story, leading to a seemingly neverending love quadrangle between the four characters that gained the nickname "Four Square" from fans and critics alike. Later actions have proven that this choice was due to the supposition that it was ostensibly "too controversial" to have an interracial pairing. Indeed, a pairing in the late 1990s between Neil Winters and Victoria Newman was axed by CBS executives, who were rumored to have received many angry phone calls and letters by viewers in the South. In 2004, a love affair between web designer Phyllis Abbott (Michelle Stafford) and chemist Damon Porter (Keith Hamilton Cobb) was prominently featured, despite concerns that the interracial pairing would be scrapped just like the one that was written before.
Unlike other soaps in the 80's or 90's, Y&R avoided preachy social issues. When they did touch on such issues as abortion or the homeless crisis or AIDS, it was only as a plot device with a few facts and statistics thrown in for effect. For instance, when Ashley Abbott (Eileen Davidson) aborted Victor's child in the 80's, any viewers or scholars who may have looked for a serious story on the pros and cons of abortion would have been disappointed. Ashley only aborted her baby because her lover Victor's wife, Nikki, was then-terminally ill, and Ashley did not want to cause her pain. After learning of her abortion, Victor ripped her to shreds, causing a devastated Ashley to lose her mind and wind up in an insane asylum (in true soap fashion, she married her psychiatrist).
CROSSOVERS
The Bells created The Bold and the Beautiful in 1987, and in 1992, the mega-popular Y&R villainess Sheila Carter (Kimberlin Brown) crossed over to B&B's Los Angeles setting. Bill Bell felt the character had committed too many crimes for her to remain in Genoa City, so she faked her death and moved to LA. She married Eric Forrester (John McCook, who was the first Lance Prentiss) and continually worried her identity would be exposed by her archnemesis Lauren Fenmore (Tracey E. Bregman), whose department store chain kept her in close contact with the Forresters. Lauren's dying husband, Scott Grainger (Peter Barton) also appeared on B&B long enough to forgive Sheila for her misdeeds. The crossovers were extremely successful and gained B&B over a million viewers. Lauren moved permanently to B&B in 1995 and stayed on the show off and on until 2000, when she again fit into the Genoa City canvas.
In 1995 Jeanne Cooper, Heather Tom, Melody Thomas Scott, J. Eddie Peck, Kristoff St. John, Eric Braeden, and Doug Davidson guested as themselves on primetime drama Diagnosis Murder. In the episode, Dr. Amanda Bentley (Victoria Rowell) won a small role on the set of Y&R, then helped solve a murder. As Rowell also appeared on Y&R (as Drucilla), there were a number of mistaken identity jokes, culminating in a scene where Amanda "met" Rowell.
In 1997, the family on the sitcom The Nanny traveled to Los Angeles, and met various cast members, including Melody Thomas Scott, Peter Bergman and Joshua Morrow, as well as B&B's Hunter Tylo, who played themselves. Eric Braeden also appeared in a guest role as a theatre critic in The Nanny's first season.
In 1999, Victor met man-hungry exec Brooke Logan (Katherine Kelly Lang) in LA and helped her make Ridge Forrester (Ronn Moss) jealous. In return, Brooke appeared on Y&R to pitch her "Brooke's Bedroom" lingerie line to Jack Abbott.
In 2001, select cast members of the series crossed over to The King of Queens. In an episode of the Kevin James sitcom, Doug Heffernan (James) dreams about the series. His wife Carrie (Leah Remini) dumps Doug for Jack Abbott, and Arthur Spooner (Jerry Stiller) searches for a secret antiaging cream that Nikki Newman has in her possession.
In 2005, Michael Baldwin (Christian LeBlanc) crossed over to As the World Turns to outcome the wrath of Julia Larrabee's murder in the courtroom trial.
In 2005, Eric Forrester(John McCook) crossed over to The Young and the Restless for a brief appearance.
In 2004, Lauren Fenmore's mother, Joanna(played by Susan Seaforth Hayes from Days Of Our Lives), appeared on The Bold And The Beautiful.
On October 31, 2005, Jeanne Cooper crossed over to B&B to meet with Massimo Marone and Stephanie Forrester.
Last edited by AdamArmand : 05-11-2005 at 22:43
