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Bell and Lee Phillip Bell created The Young and the Restless in 1972 for the network under the working title, The Innocent Years! "We were confronted with the very disturbing reality that young America had lost much of its innocence," Bell said. To compete with the youthful ABC soap operas, All My Children, One Life to Live, and General Hospital, CBS executives wanted a new daytime serial that was youth oriented. Currently, the series has been renewed by CBS to run through the 2023–2024 television season. The serial aired its 12,500th episode on May 1, 2022. The serial is also a sister series to The Bold and the Beautiful, as several actors have crossed over between shows. As of December 12, 2013, according to Nielsen ratings, The Young and the Restless marked an unprecedented 1,300 weeks, or 25 years, as the highest-rated daytime drama. As of 2008, it had appeared at the top of the weekly Nielsen ratings in that category for more than 1,000 weeks since 1988. It is also currently the highest-rated daytime drama on American television, a rank it has held for 32 years as of the end of the 2019–20 season. Since its television debut, The Young and the Restless has won 11 Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Drama Series. Despite these changes, one of its most enduring storylines was the four-decade feud between Jill Abbott and Katherine Chancellor, the longest rivalry on any American soap opera. Over the years, other families such as the Newman family, the Barber/Winters family, and the Baldwin-Fishers were introduced. Bell replaced them with new core families, the Abbotts and the Williamses. After a series of recasts and departures in the early 1980s, all the original characters except Jill Foster Abbott were written out. The Young and the Restless originally focused on two core families: the wealthy Brooks family and the working class Foster family. The series is also syndicated internationally. As of July 1, 2013, Pop still airs previous episodes on weeknights. In 2006, the series began airing previous episodes weeknights on SOAPnet until 2013, when it moved to TVGN (now Pop). The show expanded to one-hour episodes on February 4, 1980. First broadcast on March 26, 1973, The Young and the Restless was originally broadcast as half-hour episodes, five times a week. The show is set in a fictionalized version of Genoa City, Wisconsin. The Young and the Restless (often abbreviated as Y&R) is an American television soap opera created by William J.
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