The Young and the Restless: That time Peter Bergman praised Guiding Light stars Kim Zimmer and Robert Newman

The Young and the Restless fans likely recall the TV talk show, Donahue, hosted by the late, great Phil Donahue. The beloved broadcaster did more than his fair share of soap opera-themed shows over the years. In one of them, Donahue had six of your favorite stars, and one of them had nothing but praise for a fellow panelist.

The Young and the Restless, Peter Bergman

Back in 1988, Donahue invited a half dozen soap opera stars onto the show for an insightful look into soaps. The guests included All My Children's Peter Bergman (Cliff; now, Jack, The Young and the Restless) and Taylor Miller (Nina), Santa Barbara's Vincent Irizarry (Scott; ex-David, Y&R) and Robin Mattson (Gina), and Guiding Light's Robert Newman (Josh; ex-Ashland, Y&R) and Kim Zimmer Reva).

Along with taking questions from the audience ("Is the caller there?"), Donahue showed clips of the performers' work. A Josh/Reva scene that was shown presented Josh's fury that Reva had lied to him about Kyle (Larkin Malloy) being Marah's (Ashley Peldon) father -- not him. (Spoiler alert: Josh was the true daddy!).

Donahue accurately observed that soaps were considered at the time, by some, "second class" to other kinds of acting, and he hastened to add, "And it ain't!" The host championed the soap opera genre on many occasions.

Here she is, folks!

The panel included an entire roster of soap hoppers (though Bergman hadn't gone over to Y&R as Jack just yet). "That's why you see other people on different shows. Once you've done it, the work is so difficult, you are a wanted commodity. We're doing an hour show in one day. Nighttime does an hour show in 6, 7 days."

"To give you an idea of the discipline, Kim taped 6 scenes this morning before the [Donahue] show, and she and Robert are going back to tape 5 or 6 more from here," Bergman pointed out.

This was back in the day when the norm was to tape one episode a day. Now, shows complete additional shows to be economically viable.

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Donahue, AKA The Phil Donahue Show, aired for 29 seasons. Its first episode aired on November 6, 1967, and it concluded on November 13, 1996.

Catch all-new episodes of The Young and the Restless weekdays on CBS and Paramount Plus

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