The Young and the Restless (often abbreviated as Y&R) is an American television soap opera created by William J. Bell and Lee Phillip Bell for CBS. The show is set in fictional Genoa City (not the real-life similarly named Genoa City, Wisconsin). First broadcast on March 26, 1973, The Young and the Restless was originally broadcast as half-hour episodes, five times a week. The show expanded to one-hour episodes on February 4, 1980. In 2006, the series began airing previous episodes weeknights on SOAPnet until 2013, when it moved to TVGN (now Pop). From July 1, 2013 until 2019, Pop aired previous episodes on weeknights. The series is also syndicated internationally.The Young and the Restless originally focused on two core families: the wealthy Foster family and the working class Brook family. After a series of recasts and departures in the early 1980s, all the original characters except Jill Foster Abbott were written out. Bell replaced them with new core families, the Abbotts and the Williamses. Over the years, other families such as the Newman family, the Barber/Winters family, and the Baldwin-Fishers were introduced. 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.Since its television debut, The Young and the Restless has won 11 Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Drama Series. It is also currently the highest-rated daytime drama on American television, a rank it has held for 34 years as of the end of the 2021–22 season. 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. 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. The serial is also a sister series to The Bold and the Beautiful, as several actors have crossed over between shows. The series aired its 12,500th episode on May 1, 2022. Currently, the series has been renewed by CBS to run through the 2023–2024 television season.

Well-known celebrities that have made an appearance on the show include Katy Perry, Lionel Richie, Wayne Gretzky, Il Divo, Enrique Iglesias, and many others. Some well-known celebrities such as Eva Longoria, David Hasselhoff, Tom Selleck, and Paul Walker got their jumpstart on The Young and the Restless.