After decades of enthralling regular viewers and easing countless school sick days, The Young and the Restless turns 50 this week. A titan of the daytime soap opera format and one of the few left standing on broadcast television, Y&R has endured with intricate, sometimes years-long storylines and the support of an ardent fanbase that has kept it atop the ratings longer than some of its current cast have been alive. Here are five big facts you should know about a CBS institution.
1. How It Started
The genesis of Y&R comes from a familiar television motivation: competition. In the early 1970s, ABC had achieved dominance with soaps that orbited younger characters (those being General Hospital, All My Children, and One Life to Live). CBS wanted a younger-skewing soap of its own. To that end, they tapped into the creativity of William J. “Bill” Bell and his wife, Lee Phillip Bell. Bill had been a radio writer and a protégé of Irna Phillips, who created, among other programs, Guiding Light, As the World Turns and Another World (another of her mentees, Agnes Nixon, would create All My Children, One Life to Live, and Loving). Lee had been a popular talk show host in Chicago, including a 30+ year run on the eponymous The Lee Phillip Show. Bill frequently incorporated the social issues that Lee covered on her show into the scripts that he was writing for Irna Phillips’s shows and other programs like Days of Our Lives.
Given the chance to create their own show, Bill and Lee followed the youth-oriented directive and came up with The Innocent Years. Upon further reflection, figuring that America wasn’t quite so innocent anymore, the show was renamed The Young and the Restless, which they figured captured the mood of early ’70s youth. Debuting in a half-hour format, the series went to a full hour in 1980.
2. That Familiar Theme
The Young and the Restless 50th Anniversary opening credits (Uploaded to YouTube by Soap Opera Moments)
The instantly recognizable Y&R theme is a piece called “Nadia’s Theme,” composed by Barry De Vorzon and Perry Botkin Jr. The two musicians have an incredible array of soundtrack work on their resumes, ranging across both film and television. De Vorzon co-wrote popular songs like “Big Rock Candy Mountain” and handled composing duties for films like Cooley High and The Warriors. Botkin did music for TV shows like Happy Days, worked as an arranger for the likes of Bobby Darin, and produced and arranged the massively influential Incredible Bongo Band version of “Apache,” samples of which became a cornerstone of hip-hop.
The pair initially wrote “Nadia’s Theme” as “Cotton’s Dream” for the 1971 film, Bless the Beasts and Children. “Cotton’s Dream” was subsequently chosen for the Y&R theme, but then the song took a strange turn. In the mid ’70s, the popularity of Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci was at a fever pitch. In the summer of 1976, ABC’s Wide World of Sports assembled a montage of her floor work set to “Cotton’s Dream” (which, ironically, she never used for floor exercise herself). The network was inundated with requests for the song. De Vorzon and Botkin rebranded the tune as “Nadia’s Theme,” and it was released as a single. In 1976, it hit #8 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song would earn a Grammy for Best Musical Arrangement.
3. Statistical Superlatives
It’s impossible to discuss Y&R without acknowledging its most amazing record. After steadily climbing in popularity through its first 16 years, the show hit #1 in the daytime drama ratings and has held that spot for the past 34 years. The show has been awarded the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series 11 times. The series passed the 12,500 aired-episodes mark in May of 2022. Its spin-off, The Bold and the Beautiful, is one of the most popular daytime dramas in the world, airing in 110 countries.
Bill Bell’s run as head writer lasted from the show’s 1973 debut until he stepped down in 1998, making him one of the longest-tenured head writers in soaps. Bill and Lee also created something rather unusual in daytime: a family production legacy. Their oldest son, William Bell, Jr., operates the family’s production companies, Bell Dramatic Serial Company and Bell-Phillip Television Productions, Inc. Son Bradley Phillip Bell serves as Executive Producer and head writer for B&B. And their daughter, Lauralee Bell has played Christine “Cricket” Blair on Y&R since 1983.
4. Queens and Kings
The Young and the Restless has generated some of the most popular characters to ever appear on daytime. What’s more, many of the actors have served on the show for decades, or have frequently returned after breaks for other projects.
The zenith of that list has to be Jeanne Cooper, who played Katherine Chancellor from the show’s first year until her passing in 2013, a 40-year run. She was nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress once and Outstanding Lead Actress at the Daytime Emmys nine times (winning once in 2008). Cooper’s performance raised the bar for all of the actors around her, and she’s been referred to as an icon by a number of publications and “the matriarch of all soaps” by publications like The Winnipeg Press. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and made history in 1984 by allowing her own face lift procedure to be filmed and incorporated in the show as a storyline for Katherine.
The show produced another queen of the genre in Melody Thomas Scott, who has played Nikki Reed Newman since 1979. Scott was nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress at the Daytime Emmys in 1999. Her storylines over time have been tightly tied to one of the leading men of the form: Eric Braeden, who plays Victor Newman. Scott and Braeden’s combustible chemistry lifted them to dominant characters on the series. Braeden himself won a Daytime Emmy for Lead Actor in 1998, and has been nominated eight times in total. Ironically, Braeden had been intended to be a one-note villain and killed off quickly, but Bill Bell loved the actor’s work so much that he instead focused on a much longer and more complicated character journey.
5. How They Started
Shemar Moore’s first scene on The Young and the Restless (Uploaded to YouTube by RestlessRick)
While Y&R has a vast cast, many of whom have been with the show for years, even decades, the series is also notable as a launch pad for actors that have had varied and successful careers in film and television after leaving the show. Among the big names that once walked Genoa City are Tom Selleck (the original Magnum, P.I.; Blue Bloods), Eva Longoria (Desperate Housewives), David Hasselhoff (Knight Rider; Baywatch), Shemar Moore (Criminal Minds; S.W.A.T.), Penn Badgley (Gossip Girl; You), Vivica A. Fox (Kill Bill; Independence Day), Justin Hartley (This Is Us), and the late Paul Walker (The Fast & Furious franchise).
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