If you count its years as a radio drama, the soap opera Guiding Light technically ran longer.
It premiered in 1960 and is still airing today.
Even by the standards of the genre, the British series Coronation Street has been around for a while. Soap operas are notorious for following complicated storylines over multiple seasons. From daytime soaps to late night comedy programs, these are the longest running TV shows in history. It's rare when a series is popular enough to survive casting changes, cultural shifts, and disruptions in the media landscape. "No show in daytime or in primetime has touched so many millions of viewers across so many years as Guiding Light," CBS Senior Vice President Barbara Bloom told the BBC.Television is a competitive industry, and many shows are lucky to get picked up past season one. Over the years, Guiding Light introduced viewers to a number of social issues like cancer, alcoholism and teen pregnancy, CBS said in a statement at the show's cancellation. “All the characters were gathered together in a park for a picnic before the show’s long-running on-off couple, Josh and Reva, finally declared their undying love and drove off in a pickup truck.” The final episode of the show ended on a high note, writes the BBC.
Showrunners tried things: a money-saving switch to digital cameras and even, in 2006, a Marvel Comics crossover episode, but in the end CBS cancelled the show. Like all soaps, actors were regularly changed or replaced over time.īy the 2000s, like most soap operas, Guiding Light was struggling. Jim Frazier and nurse Martha Frazier, who was also his wife, were played by four actors over the years: first, Billy Dee Williams and Cicely Tyson and then James Earl Jones and Ruby Dee. In 1966, he wrote, the show also became the first network soap to introduce regular African-American characters. Here's a sample from the 1980s:Īt its start, it “focused on Reverend John Ruthledge and the community in a fictional suburb of Chicago called Five Points,” writes the BBC, “but the recent show revolved around the lives and loves of three families in the fictional mid-western town of Springfield.”Īnd over the years it hosted many actors who went on to become well-known outside soap circles, including Kevin Bacon, James Earl Jones and Calista Flockhart, Carter wrote. That exceptional run gave Guiding Light the Guinness World Record for longest-running soap opera. “The shows were.called soap operas because soap companies sponsored them.” To get people to keep tuning in, and hearing the soap ads that went with the show, each episode ended with a cliffhanger: more than 15,700 of them, according to the BBC.
When it was finally cancelled after 72 years in 2009, Guiding Light was owned by Procter & Gamble, “a link to the earliest days of daytime serial dramas on radio,” wrote Bill Carter for The New York Times. When it ended, the show was an hour-long CBS show. The show first premiered as a fifteen-minute radio spot, before becoming a half-hour television show in 1952. It was originally thought up by Irna Phillips, who was also behind As the World Turns and a whole lot of other popular soaps. The show lasted through two mediums and thousands of episodes. Today marks the eightieth anniversary of the birth of a cultural sensation that would outlast almost every other piece of broadcast media from its era: a soap opera called Guiding Light.