Last Updated on January 20, 2017
CBS made it official today, announcing that Guiding Light, the longest-running program in broadcast history, would broadcast its final episode on September 18th.
The announcement gives writers time to neatly wrap up various storylines (if they choose to) or to create new character arcs to leave things hanging at the end of the line.
By the time the show ends its unprecedented run, it will have spanned 72 years and more than 15,000 episodes.
The Guiding Light premiered on NBC radio on January 25, 1937 as a 15-minute serial and centered on the character of Rev. John Rutledge.  On June 30, 1952, the show premiered on CBS-TV, and continued to air on both radio and television with the same actors working both shows until the radio version signed off in 1956.
In 1967, the series began color broadcasts, and expanded to a half hour the following year.  In 1975, the show officially dropped the word The from its title.  Since November, 1977, it has aired as an hour-long show. Two seasons ago, in celebration of the show’s 70th year on the air, a special open was created featuring the credo that used to begin the original radio version:
There is a destiny that makes us brothers
None goes his way alone.
All that we send into the lives of others
Comes back into our own.
Last year, in a cost-cutting measure, the show attempted a brand new production model featuring permanent sets inside a studio with more realistic lighting and roughly a quarter of scenes shot outside in the town of Peapack, New Jersey, which doubles as the show’s fictional Springfield. While production costs were saved, the new look got mixed reviews from longtime fans and the show wasn’t able to create a spark in the ratings.
It is currently the lowest-rated of the eight remaining soaps on the air. Some speculate that NBC’s Days of Our Lives, which premiered in 1965, could be the next soap to disappear from daytime.
When Guiding Light airs its final episode, the next-longest-running show in broadcasting will be NBC’s Meet The Press, which is currently the longest-running television show.  Meet The Press premiered on November 6, 1947, five years before Guiding Light made the jump to the small screen.  The next-longest-running soap opera will be CBS’s As The World Turns, which premiered in 1956 and is Guiding Light’s lead-in in most markets.
There is no word from CBS about what it will air in the show’s time slot, though earlier reports indicated that CBS was considering talk shows or game shows.
Knowing now that the show’s leaving the air, would you be likely to tune in for that final episode just to see how they bring things to a close?
No. I never got into soaps. And not because they’re mostly geared toward women (apparently; not that men shouldn’t watch) but rather because they seem to contain very long storylines with deep back-stories on the characters and probably impossible to catch up on. That’s how it seems to me, anyway.
No.