When The Young and the Restless hit television screens in 1973, soap operas were a relatively new medium. Fans were captivated by the drama and intrigue featured in the show. Over the next several years, the series became an iconic piece of daytime television.
While The Young and the Restless underwent some changes in the ’80s, expanding its focus from the original core families to a larger cast of characters, it didn’t lose any steam.
Esser has been a writer on the show since 1989. As she told The Los Angeles Times in a recent profile, she’s written more than 1,600 episodes. “That’s the equivalent of writing 800 feature films and having them produced and aired,” she said.
What did Janice Ferri Esser say about living near the real Genoa City?
Esser told the LA Times that she was a television lover from the beginning. She quickly became obsessed with The Young and the Restless when she started watching the series as a college student in the ’70s. After submitting a spec script to series creator Bill Bell, she joined the writing team. Impressed with her work, Bell enlisted Esser as part of his team in 1989. She’s been a fixture ever since.
These days, she lives in a Midwestern home that is “less than an hour from the real Genoa City.” The writer said staying removed from the entertainment industry is important. “The voice of ‘The Young and the Restless’ is very much the voice of regular people in the Midwest and I didn’t want to come to Hollywood and lose that about myself.”
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Esser is primarily responsible for working with episode outlines and adding dialogue to bring each episode to life. “It’s where the sparkle comes in,” she said. “Sometimes, I make myself cry. That’s how I know it’s good.”
Janice Ferri Esser has also written for ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’
Esser told the LA Times that she’s been proud to work on many of the show’s more socially-conscious storylines, but she knows that overall, the series isn’t about her.
“This is not the business to be in if you want to be a novelist,” she said. “You have to sublimate your own ego to some extent.” While Esser is best known for her work with The Young and the Restless, she’s worked as a writer on other shows as well — most notably, she’s helped craft storylines and dialogue for The Bold and the Beautiful.
While Esser keeps herself out of the public eye in her day-to-day life, her contributions (and the contributions of the other writers) have helped to make The Young and the Restless the hit that it is today.
