The Young and the Restless

The Young and the Restless is an American soap opera, first aired in 1973 on CBS, about the residents of the fictional town of Genoa, Wisconsin. When the show first aired the show focused on two main families, the Foresters and the Brooks.

The show is, easily, the most popular soap opera on television today; it has held the daytime Ratings crown since 1989 - a total of '22 years'. Its ratings are significantly higher than the other soaps left on the air, often doubling the ratings of its closest competition.

Provides examples of:

 * Convulsive Seizures: Averted - one of the characters has Temporal Lobe Epilepsy.
 * Dramatic Half Hour: Ran for a half hour from its debut in 1973 until February 1980. It was the last soap opera to expand to an hour.
 * Lady Drunk: Kay, Nikki
 * Loads and Loads of Characters: Due to multiple main families and many supporting families. There are many characters currently in the cast.
 * Long Runners: It's been aired every weekday for almost 40 years.
 * Retool: The show is notable as one of the few soaps to completely Retool and write out the bulk of its core families. According to The Other Wiki, this was the result of the show's expansion from 30 minutes to an hour in 1980. The expansion forced the producers to renegotiate contracts; when many actors chose to leave, the writers wrote out the remaining main characters from the Foster and Brooks families, except Jill Foster. They then refocused their attention on a new pair of main families, the Williams and the Abbots. The writers later added more families: the Newmans, the Winters and, more recently, the Fisher-Baldwin family.