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 fictional Wisconsin town called Genoa City, which is unlike and unrelated to the real life village of the same name, 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. It expanded to one hour episodes on February 4, 1980. In 2006, the series began airing encore episodes weeknights on SOAPnet. The series is also syndicated internationally.

The Young and the Restless originally focused on two core families: the wealthy Brooks family and the working class Foster family. After a series of recasts and departures, in the early 1980s all the original characters except Jill Foster Abbott were written out. Bell replaced them with the new core families, the Abbotts and the Williams. Over the years, other families such as the Newmans, Winters and the Baldwin-Fishers were introduced. Despite these changes, one storyline that has endured through almost the show's entire run is the feud between Jill Foster Abbott and Katherine Chancellor, the longest rivalries on any American soap opera.

Since its debut, The Young and the Restless has won seven Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Drama Series. It is also currently the highest-rated daytime drama on American television. As of 2008, it has appeared at the top of the weekly Nielsen ratings in that category for more than 1,000 weeks since 1988. The series, along with NBC's Days of our Lives (both are from Sony Pictures Television), has been renewed through 2013 with optional 2014.