Tune-In Alert! Y&R’s Special Christmas Episode
Tune in tomorrow for a very special episode of Y&R that celebrates the holiday. “This is my first year of [head] writing and the network doesn’t usually have an original show on Christmas Day, so we normally put on a repeat,” reports Executive Producer/Head Writer Mal Young. “Earlier this year, one of the regular episodes got pre-empted by an event so that bumped the amount of episodes needed. The network said, ‘You owe us an episode, why not do a real one for Christmas Day?’ I love Christmas, so I jumped at the chance.” Airing on the holiday wasn’t a new concept for British-born Young. “In England, the soaps, like CORONATION STREET and EASTENDERS, the biggest episode of the year is on Christmas Day,” he explains. “It’s the most-watched day and it’s a big competition with all of the soaps. If you’re killing someone off, you always kill them on Christmas Day. These episodes are watched by half the country! First, you watch the Queen’s speech and then you tune in to EASTENDERS for mayhem. So, I come from that tradition.” Young was aware that there was an opportunity to pull in new viewers, so he wanted to find a way to give the episode mass appeal. “This is a chance for people who don’t watch us to tune in and go, ‘Oh, I didn’t know Y&R was like this. This is fun,’ ” he says. “But also please the regular audience. When I came to the writers, every idea I came up with, they said, ‘It’s been done.’ They’ve already done A Christmas Carol and It’s A Wonderful Life. Then it suddenly occurred to me, why not just do four mini-movies, like self-contained plays, so Four Christmases was the idea. We needed a theme, something to glue the four stories together. Each is named after a Christmas song. We looked at the long list of Christmas songs available to us and selected four titles that I thought would suggest story.”
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