Since the first episode aired back on March 26 of 1973 the two central families, the Brooks and the Fosters had been butting heads in Genoa City, Wisconsin. The Brooks family, you see, are wealthy and prosperous with all the usual baggage that comes with that territory. On the other hand the Foster family remains poor and while they may not exactly pass for "trailer trash" they do manage to act like it. As the years went by however, the central characters left for various reasons so were replaced by two new "core" families, the Abbotts and the Williams. The show also went from a one half hour per day "soap" to an hour long "soap opera" in back 1980. Two of the central characters have remained, to this day, rivals and star performers. Both Katherine Chancellor and Jill Foster Abbott have been involved in many plot twists and turns over the past nearly forty years of the long running soap's history. Major story lines have included sexual relationships involving an early introduction into premarital sexual intercourse, lesbianism, incest, impotence, rape, and even breast cancer, bulimia, and alcoholism, just your basic human frailties and diseases.

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