Jaime Lyn Bauer

Jaime Lyn Bauer plays Lorie Brooks on The Young and the Restless (CBS, 1973–present), the 1970s daytime canvas that retoolled kitchen-sink gloom for youth and wealth. Genoa City boardrooms and bedrooms; a theme that still sounds like a billboard.

Lorie is glamour as strategy — the face the hour uses to argue that soap can look expensive and still plot like a feud. Bauer sells the close-up as a weapon.

Lorie Brooks only works if the series around it is a place. The Young and the Restless (CBS, 1973–present) is that place. Jaime Lyn Bauer’s Lorie Brooks put youth-and-wealth glamour on The Young and the Restless — Genoa City boardrooms, bedrooms, a 1970s soap that decided looks were a ratings strategy. Billboard-handsome theme, long memory.

A one-night map opens on s1973e01 (March 26, 1973 is the Genoa City open. Daytime retools for youth and wealth instead of kitchen-sink gloom: glamour as a ratings strategy, the billboard-handsome theme still loading). If you want the hour that still shows the bruise, hold s1984e70: April 13, 1984 is an 1980s boardroom landmark. Newman and Abbott wars already rumbling: the 1970s soap that decided glamour was the point, now looking like a perfume ad that files daily. A third pin is s1990e02: January 2, 1990 is a New Year filing in a still-running empire. Mega-list discipline: one weekday as a stake, not a recap of the bedroom-and-boardroom decades already stacked.

Newman and Abbott wars rumble later; this is the decade that set the lighting. On TV Flash Bauer is 1970s daytime voltage: the Brooks who made Genoa City photograph as desire, still the reason the catalog files Y&R as a glamour bet that paid.