The Young and the Restless celebrates its 50th anniversary with a special on March 27.
Janice Lynde admitted that she gets “goosebumps” thinking about the show celebrating its 50th year, saying, “I’ve said it before — it’s surreal because we weren’t sure we would last for one year during Watergate, that’s how long ago it was in 1973, and it’s absolutely thrilling. I think it’s fabulous. Thank you to Lee [Phillip Bell] and Bill [William J. Bell] for creating it!”
Being a former concert pianist, the actress continued, “placed me on the international map in a manner I wasn’t before” and she “became the world’s darling for a few years” while working on the soap.
The love story between Brad and Leslie was her favorite, as it helped people with psychiatric problems access resources before it was popular.
Camryn Grimes echoed the sentiment, sharing that as an actress who recently celebrated her 25th anniversary on the show and having played two different characters, “if you would have asked me back then if I would be here celebrating the 50th anniversary of the show, I would have told you that you were crazy!”
“But dreams do come true. I mean, this show is home and I can’t think of a better place to be,” she added. “There is this connectivity that happens when you’re in somebody’s home every single day and when you have a show that you could almost hand down generationally, it creates this bond that you have with your audience that is so rare. And I’ve always said that soap operas have their thumb on the pulse of society and what’s happening and what’s going on, and that can be really cathartic for people to watch. So I think all of that brings this beautiful symbiosis of us and what we do and our audience.”
“Without the fans, we wouldn’t be here… and our wonderful creators, Bill and Lee Bell,” Melody Thomas Scott told ET. “They were very specific when they first started the show how they wanted it to be, how they wanted it to look, how they wanted it to feel for the viewers watching, and I think that we have maintained those even today, 50 years later.”