It's Only My Opinion By Carolyn Hinsey

Happy 50th Y&R! It’s been a wild, entertaining journey, huh?

- Carolyn Hinsey

The first episode in 1973 of this revolutionary soap set the tone for what was to come. Various members of the haves (Brooks) and the have-nots (Fosters) were looking for love in small-town Genoa City when injured stranger Brad Elliot got into a dispute at the local restaurant because he couldn’t pay his bill. Patriarch Stuart Brooks put the stranger’s food on his tab and soon Brad — who turned out to be a presumed-dead doctor — was dating Stuart’s daughter Leslie. Note: This is probably the only soap debut that featured not one but two people playing the piano within a halfhour episode.

Sex, drugs and alcohol played a bigger role on this “restless” new outing than it did on other shows. Wild child Lorie Brooks met fellow partier Brock Reynolds in Paris, which introduced us to his wealthy mother, Katherine Chancellor. Katherine’s husband, Phillip, cheated on her with local manicurist Jill Foster (who got pregnant, natch) and the show we know today started to take shape.

By 1980, Katherine had hired ruthless businessman Victor Newman to run Chancellor Industries and the action shifted to his take-noprisoners behavior, cheating on his wife, Julia, with Lorie Brooks and achieving a hostile takeover of Jabot, which created a lifelong rivalry with Jack Abbott. Show me a more iconic scene than Victor having a heart attack and Jack stepping over his body, kicking his enemy’s hand on the way out.

Villains are one of Y&R’s strengths. Victor is the gold standard but Phyllis has worked her way up to silver, always doing the wrong thing for the right reason (or so she thinks) and seriously interfering in her kids’ lives. Phyllis (to Summer): “I will never, ever change.”