Talking TV: ‘Young & Restless’ Stars Peter Bergman And Susan Walters On Show’s 50th

While daytime television has seen a merciless culling of soap operas, The Young and the Restless thrives.

The show, recently renewed through 2024, marks its 50^th anniversary on March 26 and still commands more than 3.6 million daily viewers.

Peter Bergman has been on the show since 1989 as one of its central characters, entrepreneur Jack Abbott. Susan Walters, who plays Abbott’s fiancée and reformed villain Diane Jenkins, had her first stint on the show in 2001 and returned full-time to the cast last year. The two have navigated their way through loves, divorces, court cases, faked deaths, doppelgangers and all the other hurdles that the soap universe is apt to throw at its characters.

In this Talking TV conversation, they reflect on how the show has changed in their respective tenures, the qualities that keep its most ardent viewers returning for their daily fix of Genoa City drama and the rigor of soap’s production schedule. They also share their optimism for Y&R’s continued longevity.

Episode transcript below, edited for clarity.

Michael Depp: The Young and the Restless celebrates its 50th broadcast anniversary on March 26. It has been the highest-rated daytime drama on television for the past 35 years and gets about 3.67 million viewers per episode, according to Nielsen. It has won 11 Emmy Awards for Outstanding Drama series along the way.

Peter Bergman and Susan Walters are two actors with long running connections to the show. Bergman joined in 1989 as entrepreneur Jack Abbott. Walters came on board as Diane Jenkins, initially from 2001 to 2004, came back for a couple of episodes in 2010 and returned once more as a regular cast member and is now, as I understand it, a reformed baddie. Their two characters are, in the way of soap operas, an on again, off again couple who are, as I’ve learned from recent episodes, about to tie the knot.

I’m Michael Depp, editor of TVNewsCheck, and this is Talking TV. Today, a conversation with Bergman and Walters about The Young and the Restless, its longevity, its evolution and its future. We’ll be right back.

Welcome, Peter Bergman and Susan Walters, to Talking TV.

Peter Bergman: Thank you, Mike.

Susan Walters: Thanks for having us.

Well, first of all, congratulations on 50 years of The Young and the Restless. That’s remarkable.

Peter Bergman: It’s amazing, isn’t it?

It is. I mean, 50 years makes it as much of an institution as it is a show. And it’s one of only four surviving soaps, which makes the anniversary all the more remarkable. What has made The Young and the Restless so enduring?

Susan Walters: Him!

Peter Bergman: No.

Susan Walters: He’s been on a long time.

Peter Bergman: You know, we wondered the same thing, but I’ll throw out a couple of theories. I think when you tune in to Y&R, unlike many shows with a revolving cast of characters, you pretty much know who you’re going to see. You can pretty well be guaranteed to see, you know, six of your principal actors, many of whom have been here for more than 30 years. So, these are characters you grew up with, you grew up around. And I think that’s the draw. I think we’ve all grown up together in everyone’s living room.

Susan Walters: And I think along that same vein is that as the maybe the core audience has gotten older, the stories for the actors that have grown up on the show and have aged on the show have stayed relevant. So, it’s not a new cast of characters because, you know, people our age in real life have lives, you know, and have a lot going on. And the show continues to show that.

Perhaps their lives are not as interesting as yours.

Susan Walters: Thank God. Thank God.

I think you’re right about that. I read at one point in the late ’60s, early ’70s, there were 19 soaps in the market.

Peter Bergman: When this show started in ’73, there were 13 other network soaps.

Wow.

Peter Bergman: Yeah. Just to give it context, I love sharing a couple of factoids that I found out: Richard Nixon was president. There were 13 other soap operas. And the big ratings challenge that first summer for The Young and the Restless was competing with the Watergate trials.

Wow. Yeah, that’s amazing. So, Peter, you’re technically in your fourth decade on this show,

Paul Bergman: Am technically in in the middle of my third decade.

OK, sorry.

Peter Bergman: My third decade on the show and my fourth decade in daytime television. So, yeah.

In all that time, how has the show itself evolved in that tenure? 

Peter Bergman: There’s lots of changes. We used to have just hand-over-fist money to build any set we wanted to, as big as we wanted to. They loved the scale and everything. And that has changed. We have more sets up. They are smaller. We can get more story told with more sets. So, that that has been an evolution. There used to be a town trollop. There used to be a guy who was a little too easy with the ladies. Post AIDS, that’s almost offensive. So, we’re a little more careful with people who sleep around. What else? Those are two of the changes I’ve seen. The writing is very much the same. You know, obviously, telling a more, you know, antique story was easier to do before this. The audience is a bit more sophisticated now. We can’t do the Grand Guignol anymore.

And Susan, you’ve had sort of an on-again/off-again relationship with this show. As I mentioned at the top, you were in it before you came back briefly and then have now come back again about a year ago. What’s been your own experience with how the show has changed from rejoining it at these intervals?

Peter Bergman: Yeah, what changes?

Susan Walters: You know, it’s a very good question because I really noticed it from being on the show. You know, I left in 2004. Back then, I think it’s kind of what Peter was talking to, how there’s not as much survival in daytime anymore. And so, they’ve had to do things to keep it going. We used to go slower, filming used to go slower. We used to do maybe two or three takes of a scene and we did five shows a week as opposed to five shows in four days, which is what we do now. So, like today, Peter’s doing three shows.

Peter Bergman: Three shows, yup.

Susan Walters: That’s a lot of material, you know, And I remember being busy before and doing a lot of homework before, but I don’t think it’s just my age. I do a lot more homework now to remember everything. I think also having the bigger sets, like Peter said, you know. We moved around a lot more, which sometimes takes up time. But it’s interesting. I do love the pace. I when I left, I, you know, I’ve done nighttime and movies and … we did scenes today that were pretty emotional. And for me, I have a hard time holding on to that all day over the course of 12 hours to do three pages where we did five pages in a half an hour.

It seems like it’s a grueling production schedule and this is an assembly line.

Susan Walters: It’s helpful that way.

Peter Bergman: On a nighttime show if we got five pages done in a day, it’d be a pretty good day. Pretty good day. So, we did five pages in half an hour.

Susan Walters: What I was also reminded of coming back to the show after 20 years was how professional everybody is on this show. I mean, obviously the crew and the writing and the whole show itself from a production standpoint is so well-oiled. But the actors, they come in, they know their lines. There’s no messing around, you know, And it was intimidating, but it’s also really fun to have that bar.

Peter Bergman: It is.

Susan Walters: He sets it.

Peter Bergman: We have a lot of actors who come to work ready to play.

Susan Walters: Yeah, it’s really fun.

Well, you both are invested, it seems, with these characters and you play them for so long and at these intervals. What is it like? What is the experience like being that character for so long, having that relationship for so long? What goes on in your mind with regards to what you bring to the performance there?

Peter Bergman: It’s kind of a two-tiered one. You want to protect your character’s integrity and honesty and basic intelligence, and you are protective of that kind of thing. But you also want to think that your character has grown, that your character has changed. I would be terribly disappointed if Susan came back, and Jack Abbott hadn’t changed at all. He was the exact same guy.

He’s been through tons of life experience and like we all do, we change as life knocks us around a little bit. That’s true of the character I play, and I always want to be aware of that change, you know. There were certainly periods where Jack was quite the cad, and it was fun to play and everything, but Jack’s had too much life experience for that. Jack learned empathy somewhere along the way, and I don’t fight that. I like that character to change and grow. But yeah, you can hear the way I talk about him. I’m very protective of him.

Sure. And, Susan, this is not your first soap, you’ve been doing them since your teens, right?

Susan Walters: Yes, I did my first soap when I was 19.

I wonder in terms of the acting aesthetics that you bring to soaps versus the other kinds of shows or movies that you’ve done. Is it different? Is there a different acting style that you bring to it or that audiences expect from it?

Susan Walters: You know, I don’t necessarily think there should be. I mean, obviously there’s a difference between doing a sitcom and that kind of reaching the audience, you know, on a sitcom as opposed to a film or whatever. But as far as you know, the old idea of soap acting, I don’t I mean, we certainly don’t have that.

I think what’s really challenging and interesting for me is to take the material that we get every single day — and it’s a lot — and to make it as real as possible and have the connection with the other person. You know, obviously we’re having to say a lot of dialogue that explains to the audience that might not have turned in the day before what happened the day before, and that you just have to allow for, you know, you can’t expect everybody to watch every minute of every day. So, you allow for that. But then also to just have connections with another person in the scene is I mean, that’s just acting no matter what medium you’re in.

And speaking of connections, do you both have any connections with the writers? Do you sort of help draw where the character’s arc is going to go next?

Peter Bergman: Our writers live all over the country. They’re never in the same room. It’s funny, the head writer is here in the building, and we have a relationship with him because he’s also the executive producer of the show. And we see him on the studio floor in the morning. And as much as anything, I talk to him about his life and his two daughters and what his travels are and things like that as much as I do about Jack Abbott. But yeah, I have no connection with what writers are going to write, how they are going to write. And I’m one who doesn’t really like to know what’s going to happen next. So, when I get a new script, I can’t open it fast enough.

Susan Walters: I get the email and I’ll start reading it. I’ll sit in the car and read it on the way home. Yeah, yeah. Not driving, but you know.

You can get some curveballs from the writers that you don’t see coming.

Susan Walters: Oh yeah. And as far as communicating with the writers, they’re doing so much, you know, on a daily basis. In the big picture, I look at how they handled Diane’s rebirth, you know, an explanation of faking her death and how they brought the whole thing back. And I’m like, wow, they couldn’t have done it better for me. They would all have written to the stuff that worked for Susan, you know, and then also work for the audience. So, I’m like, well, I think I’m in pretty good hands. So, you know, I just like to I like to read it when I get it.

I want to ask you both about the fans. It’s my understanding of soap fans that they’re particularly ardent. They develop very close relationships with the characters, and hell, I’m developing close relationships, and I have no context, the last couple of days watching this. What do you know about your fans? What do they tell you about themselves when you meet them or when they write to you?

Peter Bergman: So, I always call them viewers. There’s something about the word fans that always kind of rubs me wrong, but just for our conversation … I always love meeting people who watch the show. We work in a vacuum. We have no audience. We have no idea what works and what doesn’t work. If somebody is going to say hello and tell me you got to stay away from Diane, she is trouble, I have some sense of what someone feels about what they’re watching.

We obviously owe a great deal to people who faithfully tune in the show every day and keep it going. That’s but it’s definitely more distant than that. We live in Los Angeles, where people don’t come up to you as often. They just saw Mick Jagger around the corner. They’re not going to make a giant thing of their soap opera person.

But once you make contact, I always say that I can have a half-hour conversation with an absolute stranger. And we will never mention Jack Abbott’s name. We can talk about the show. You know, they they’ve been watching for years and years. They know all kinds of things about the show, about you, about life. Yes. It’s yeah, it’s an amazing kind of familiarity. Now, what are you going to say to Robert Redford if you run into him on the street? I love The Natural. You have nothing to say.

Susan Walters: And opinions about it. And things have changed, obviously, since Loving when there certainly wasn’t social media. I think what happens also with viewers is people on daytime are in their home every day. They’re in their home while they’re doing stuff in the house. Right. So, you become a lot more familiar to them than someone that we used to only see on a big screen or a nighttime show once a week. Things have kind of changed now with streaming and everything. You have people much more accessible in your home. You know, actors of all genres. But I think with daytime they really felt that they knew you because you were in the house so often.

Well, from what I’ve heard, most of your consumption, that the three something million people watching, are watching on linear still. I mean, it’s available on streaming.

Peter Bergman: That’s great. So, I don’t I don’t fully know or embrace the streaming thing and I know that’s a very, very fast-growing audience, but I’m thrilled that people are watching it when it airs.

Susan Walters: Oh, yeah.

You mentioned social a moment ago. Has that changed anything about the show, about the way you interact with people responding to the show or how the show has grown or changed in any way?

Peter Bergman: I’m not involved in social media, and to CBS and Sony’s great chagrin, I’m probably not the person to talk to about this. I’ll tell you, the flip side of it is dealing with young actors who are concerned that their audience doesn’t want to see them in this particular situation. And I think what? That is framing your choices that you make as an actor, what the audience is going to say about your character?

Susan Walters: And it’s only a very small portion of the audience, which I have to remind myself. I mean, to be perfectly honest, you know, there wasn’t Twitter when I was on the show before, so I made the mistake, you know, going on Twitter after I came back to the show. And I’m thinking, you know, Diane’s gotten older, and Susan’s gotten older, and it’ll be very empowering for these people to see that I age.

Peter Bergman: And what did they say?

Susan Walters: It wasn’t pretty at all. And actually, it was, you know, not that I think I look great, but I was really blown away by how nasty people were about the way me, Susan, looked, you know, And now that the character of Diane has taken off and they they’ve been reintroduced to Diane, now, comments would be about Diane if I was still looking at Twitter, which of course, I never do. Yeah, it’s not it’s not healthy for me, is it?

Not very well moderated these days.

Susan Walters: No, it’s not. You know, our job as an actor is to not think of ourselves as actors doing this thing and the result of somebody else seeing it. My job today was that my character is in a situation and his character’s talking to me about it, right? And we are those people. So, to constantly be worrying about the result, which is written about on social media, doesn’t serve me as an actor at all, if that makes any sense. And especially if people are discussing maybe negative things about the way they think you look. That really doesn’t do me any good. But it’s fun that people who really love this show get on and have such, you know, passion.

Peter Bergman: Oh yeah, I think I’m grateful that there’s a world of people talking about the show.

Susan Walters: And they really get into it

Peter Bergman: I just have nothing to contribute to the conversation.

Well, the show’s been renewed through 2024, which is about as good of an assurance as you can get for a soap these days. What’s your sense about how much runway is still in front of The Young and the Restless?

Peter Bergman: Five years ago, I was making plans for the end of daytime television and financial plans, talking with my wife about what the next step is, because we’ve got to stay ahead of this thing because they’re going to pull the rug out. I think I did that 10 years ago and five years ago. And today I say no, it actually has better legs than I realized. It’s going to be around for a while. It’s going to be around. There is an audience for this kind of entertainment that is crystal clear. And I think you said 3.7 millionish people every day. There are hundreds of shows in television that don’t get anywhere near those numbers.

Susan Walters: No way. If you had that on some cable shows, you would have a giant hit.

Peter Bergman: You’d have a hit in your hands. Yes.

Susan Walters: I think also it shows that the show has survived. You know, I remember before there was such an influx of daytime talk shows, you know, and repeats of nighttime shows during the day and everything. And obviously, the show has survived that. You know, so I think there’s still more story to tell. I think it has legs.

And you have viewers, I’m sure, some who have followed you for the entire 50 years of the show and through the decades. Is it more challenging to pick up younger viewers who are just not habituated to linear TV at all, let alone to soaps?

Peter Bergman: It is the challenge. Yeah. They did not grow up waiting to see what was on television at what time.

Susan Walters: Right. We had to plan things out that way. There’s a lot of nighttime cable shows that have huge audiences after the fact when they can stream, and they don’t even watch it when it’s first out.

In terms of the surviving soaps and the three others, and I’m glad to know you have confidence in some longevity that you maybe didn’t have a couple of years ago. What do you think that your show needs to do to keep holding on? Is it kind of hewing to those core formulas of storylines, certain types of storylines that the show has or the sort of archetypal characters that have served it so far? Or is it a question of continuously adapting?

Peter Bergman: I think B, I think continuously adapting. I think, as Susan said earlier, relevance is everything and something that the audience identifies with now. At the same time, I’m saying there are formulaic aspects to this kind of entertainment, that there are things we do incredibly well. Power, money, family, romance, betrayal. We have the time to tell a long story that other shows don’t have. They’ve got to tell one episode and we get to tell it over time. A good long story arc.

A little less Grand Guignol, though, as you said earlier.

Peter Bergman: Yes, less so. The audience more and more wants to see you being real. Yeah.

Well, Peter Bergman, Susan Walters, you’ve been very kind to wend through this broader analysis of soaps with me, so thank you so much. And congratulations to you both for very exceptional achievement. 50 years.

Peter Bergman: Thank you, Michael, for having us. And thank you for the research on your part. Yeah, absolutely.

Susan Walters: Enjoy the show.

It’s been the highlight of my week watching. You can watch past episodes of Talking TV on TVNewsCheck.com and our YouTube channel, though not quite 50 years’ worth and with far fewer plot twists. Thanks for watching this one and see you next time.