Goodbye Guiding Light

September 18, 2009

For the most part, everyone’s life could be turned into a soap opera. There are always those instances where it seems like our lives are turning into daytime dramas. SO the question is, with our lives practically writing themselves for a 5 star rated show, how come we are so drawn to shows like Young and the Restless, One Life to Live, The Bold and the Beautiful and Guiding Light? Do we not have enough going on with ourselves that we have to be entranced by something else such as more drama?

However, this week we lost the longest running soap opera in history. Guiding Light said goodbye and farewell with its last episode airing on September 18, 2009 on CBS. Beginning on January 25, 1937, Guiding Light hit the radio airwaves, than transitioned to television June 30, 1952. Guiding Light has seen many great times and even had some well-known actors pass through, with names like Kevin Bacon, Hayden Panettiere, John Wesley Shipp and Calista Flockhart.

1983 brought some of the longest running actor/actresses to Guiding Light that made it all the way from 26 years ago until the last and final episode. Kim Zimmer (Reva Shayne), Michael O’Leary (Rick Bauer), Jordan Clarke (Billy Lewis), Grant Aleksander (Phillip Granville Spaulding), and Tina Sloan (Lillian Raines) all have been crucial in the making of this drama.

We have seen it all here on our precious GL, weddings, affairs, funerals, back stabbings, kid’s births, kid’s growing up (unusually sprouting from 8 years old one week to being a high school student the next), and kid’s deaths. We have laughed, we have cried, we have felt it all with this show.

No matter how much we do or do not watch the shows and no matter how much we admit we watch them, we can usually always find a character to relate with; whether it was the pregnant Daisy who decided to have an abortion, the rich and selfish ruler Alan Spaulding, Cassie who lost her only daughter to a murder, the star crossed lovers Reva and Josh or one of the Lewis’s or Bauer’s.

Not one has become more apart of television life than Guiding Light. That is probably why it seems so hard to say our adieus.

Nevertheless, we bid Guiding Light a farewell. In hopes that this one-hour a day program changed the lives of the cast, and that in finding new jobs the Light of the show always stays with them. I know it will stay with me, no matter how crazy it sounds. “The End.”