CBS's The Young and the Restless

Genoa City, Wisconsin. On the map, it’s nothing more than another town in another state. But on daytime television it is a lot more than that. Genoa City is where the plot of The Young and the Restless takes place. “The rivalries, romances, hopes and fears of the residents of the fictional Midwestern metropolis,” says tv.com.
The show premiered on March 26, 1973 and right from the start has been dominated by the Newman, Abbott and Winters families. The show seems to be based on a couple of lifelong, show-long rivalries. One, being between Victor Newman and Jack Abbott and their long time arguments with business and always trying to out-do one another. The other being between Jill Abbott and Katherine Chancellor, for the longest time they didn’t know they were mother and daughter and would fight like cats and dogs somehow living under the same roof. Then shortly after finding out they were related they had a civil spell, which quickly took a turn for the worse.
There are so many ups and downs in the plot lines of soaps but the one in CBS’s Y & R never seizes to amaze me. You think that maybe they finally calm things down and come to a normal plot line, but it will always get extremely out of hand again. Especially with the help of Gloria Abbott, mother of Michael Baldwin and Kevin Fischer, she is always scheming up something to make her look like the better person. When really, all it ever does is dig her a deeper and deeper hole. Maybe that is why her son, Kevin, is exactly like her. Thank god that her other son Michael is a lawyer, who can somehow always win over the courts to release either his mother or his younger brother. One of these days, one of them, or maybe even both, will get themselves into so much trouble that Michael will not be able to help them out.
Another thing that baffles me about this show is the relationships that take place. If a couple dates, marries or what not they are almost always guaranteed to break up, see someone else and yet still get back together afterwards. For example I think Victor Newman goes through a cycle of women. He is never satisfied with a new one; he will always go back to one of the ladies he has previously married. Personally I think that he should give up trying new relationships and just go back to being with Nikki, they have and I think always will love each other and no one else.









http://www.tv.com/the-young-and-the-restless/show/100/summary.html
http://www.cbs.com/daytime/the_young_and_the_restless/

Soaps in the Beginning

A soap opera by definition is a drama, typically performed as a serial on daytime television or radio, characterized by stock characters and situations, sentimentality, and melodrama.
The term “soap opera” was given during the 1930s by the American press to refer to the extraordinarily popular genre of serialized domestic radio dramas. By the 1940s they covered 90% of the commercially-sponsored daytime broadcast hours. The "soap" in soap opera represented their sponsorship by manufacturers of household cleaning products; while "opera" suggested an ironic absurdity between the domestic narrative concerns of the daytime serial and the most elevated of dramatic forms.
Soaps tend to be extremely dramatic, they have a completely unrealistic plot line, but I believe that is why there are so many people who enjoy watching them, they kind of let your imagination run a bit but it seems real because it is real actors and happens typically Monday-Friday. In other words, you feel like you are actually living in their life, because you are exposed to it daily and you can somewhat relate to what you are taking in from the television, radio or internet.
I quite enjoyed my grandfather’s take on soap operas. He was flipping through the channels one day as I was scrapbooking and we came across The Young and the Restless and he stopped for a moment to watch about 30 seconds of it. The show went to commercials and his comment was, “These things they call soaps, the characters on them are always either kissing, fighting, crying, getting married, in jail or coming back from the dead”, which is basically completely true! Each soap airing today will have a different version of the plot of one another. Growing up, my mom always watched Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless and if one person died on one show, another person was to shortly after die on the other. The same thing would happen if there was a wedding on one of the two.
http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/S/htmlS/soapopera/soapopera.htm