Guiding Light

Guiding Light (known as The Guiding Light before 1975) is an American television soap opera that is listed in Guinness World Records as the longest-running drama in television in American history, broadcast on CBS for 57 years from June 30, 1952 until September 18, 2009, preceded by a 15-year broadcast on radio.Guiding Light is the longest running soap opera and the fifth longest running program in all of broadcast history; only the American country music radio program Grand Ole Opry (first broadcast in 1925), the BBC religious program The Daily Service (1928), the CBS religious program Music and the Spoken Word (1929), and the Norwegian children's radio program Lørdagsbarnetimen (first aired in 1924, cancelled in 2010) have been on the air longer.

Guiding Light was created by Irna Phillips, and began as an NBC Radio serial on January 25, 1937. On June 2, 1947, the series was transferred to CBS Radio, before starting on June 30, 1952, on CBS Television. It continued to be broadcast concomitantly on radio until June 29, 1956. The series was expanded from 15 minutes to a half-hour during 1968, and then to a full hour on November 7, 1977. The series broadcast its 15,000th CBS episode on September 6, 2006.

Guiding Light (1937–49)

The Guiding Light (TGL) was a long-running radio series which became the longest-running American television soap opera.

Show development

The series was created by Irna Phillips, who based it on personal experiences. After giving birth to a still-born baby at age 19, she found spiritual comfort listening to sermons by a preacher of a church centered on the brotherhood of man. It was these sermons that formed the nucleus of the creation of The Guiding Light, which began as a radio show. From 1934 to 1946, the show was broadcast from Chicago on the NBC radio network.

The show was cancelled by NBC twice, once in 1939 and once in 1946. The first time on October 13, 1939, it was brought back by popular demand of the listening audience and began again only four months later in January 22, 1940. (Although some of the characters, Rose Kransky and part of her family, briefly transitioned to another Phillips' creation, The Right to Happiness, with Phillips bringing back the characters to The Guiding Light when NBC restarted the show.) The November 29, 1946 NBC cancellation coincided with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission forcing a split of NBC and the creation of the ABC network. CBS would pick up the show seven months later on June 2, 1947. CBS would be where the show would stay until its cancellation on television in September 2009.

Guiding Light (1970–79)

The Guiding Light (TGL) (known since 1975 as Guiding Light) was a long-running American television soap opera.

Show development

In the 1970s, unlike in the 1960s after Agnes Nixon left to begin writing for Another World in 1966, there was less of a revolving doors of head writers and story line seemed to stabilize in only two directions, first what was aired from January 1, 1970 to near the end of October 1975 and then what was aired from near the beginning of November 1975 to the end of the decade on December 31, 1979. The first half of the decade was mainly dominated by the story lines that were written by the head writing married couple of Robert Soderberg and Edith Sommer who wrote for the show from near the end of 1969 to the spring of 1973 and were long time and reliable soap scribes. And then the head writing team that replaced Soderberg and Sommer, James Gentile, Robert Cenedella and former The Guiding Light cast member James Lipton continued most of the stories in the same direction as started by Soderberg and Sommer from the spring of 1973 to near the end of October 1975.