[1] With 72 years of radio and television runs, Guiding Light is the longest-running American soap opera, ahead of General Hospital.

[8] On April 1, 2009, CBS announced that it was canceling Guiding Light after 72 years on the air (15 on radio and 57 on television) due to low ratings.

During the period from 1952 to 1956, The Guiding Light existed as both a radio and television serial, with actors recording their performances twice for each day that the shows were broadcast.

Much of the story during the first half of the 1970s was dominated by Stanley Norris' November 1971 murder and the subsequent trial, as well as the exploits of villainesses Charlotte Waring and Kit Vested.

Pressured by newer, more youth-oriented soap operas such as All My Children, Procter & Gamble hired head writers Bridget and Jerome Dobson in 1975, who started writing in November.

They also introduced several new characters, including Rita Stapleton, whose complex relationships with Roger and Ed propelled much of the story for the remainder of the decade, as well as mogul Alan Spaulding and brash lawyer Ross Marler.

Her father, Steve Jackson, remained on the show for the remainder of the 1970s, serving as a senior physician at Cedars, and as a friend and companion to Bert Bauer.

During Long's first stint as writer, the show shifted focus to the young love quadrangle of Rick Bauer, Phillip Spaulding, Mindy Lewis, and Beth Raines.

[15] Executive producer Jill Farren Phelps cast a number of actors she'd worked with at other shows, particularly at Santa Barbara, in new roles at GL.

Among them: Justin Deas, in the role of long lost Cooper patriarch Buzz; and Marj Dusay as the new actress to play Alexandra Spaulding.

In 1994, the show brought former Santa Barbara actress Marcy Walker to the canvas to play antiheroine Tangie Hill, but the pairing of Tangie with Josh Lewis proved unpopular, and Walker decided not to renew her contract[16] In 1995, Guiding Light brought back fan favorite Nola Chamberlain, played by Lisa Brown.

As the decade progressed, Guiding Light began to feature stories with more outlandish plot twists, seemingly to compete with shows like Passions and Days of Our Lives.

Producer Ellen Wheeler introduced a "shaky-cam" style, present in a number of movies, featuring extreme-closeups and frequent cuts, including those that "broke the axis" (which proved disorienting to viewers accustomed to shows with the traditional "soap opera look").

On April 1, 2009, CBS canceled Guiding Light after 72 years, with the series finale on the network airing on September 18, 2009, making it the second-to-last Procter & Gamble soap opera to end.

The Guiding Light handled the competition breezily, even against otherwise-legendary shows such as Queen for a Day on ABC (briefly in 1960) and NBC's Truth or Consequences.

Search for Tomorrow took over the entire 12:30–1/11:30–Noon period, with The Guiding Light returning to its first timeslot, 2:30/1:30, albeit in the now-standard half-hour format, on September 9.

This twin bill of expansions also caused the dislocation of The Secret Storm and the beloved Art Linkletter's House Party, as well as the cancellation of the daytime To Tell the Truth.

After four years of airing at 2:30/1:30, CBS acceded to a demand made by The Guiding Light producer Procter & Gamble and moved its sibling series, The Edge of Night, to the earlier hour from its previous home at 3:30/2:30.

Moving back one half hour, The Guiding Light stayed steadily on course against NBC's Days of Our Lives and ABC's The Newlywed Game.

In late 1974, ABC replaced The Newlywed Game with The $10,000 Pyramid, which went on to garner strong ratings, but not greatly at The Guiding Light's expense.

Thus, in December, Guiding Light moved back to 2:30/1:30 in place of The Edge of Night, which switched networks and began airing on ABC.

With this in mind, ABC and CBS acted to give a contending chance to both General Hospital and Guiding Light by expanding them to an hour in length.

This gained particular importance when ABC finally expanded both One Life to Live and General Hospital to an hour on January 16, 1978, so that Guiding Light straddled those two programs, as well as the first half of sister P&G show Another World on NBC.

On February 4, 1980, CBS bumped Guiding Light down again, to 3 p.m./2c, and its sister P&G soap As The World Turns to 2 p.m./1c, in the midst of a major scheduling shuffle intended to give The Young and the Restless (itself now expanding to an hour length) a shot at beating ABC's All My Children.

It remained in this time slot for the rest of its run in some markets, facing General Hospital and NBC entries such as Texas (a spin-off of Another World), The Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour and Santa Barbara.

Overall, the first half of the 1980s saw a revival in Guiding Light's popularity, with a top-five placing achieved in most years and even a brief dethroning of then-powerhouse General Hospital from the #1 ratings spot for three consecutive weeks.

Up until its CBS finale in 2009, stations in a number of markets aired Guiding Light in the morning either at 9 or 10 a.m. local time: Miami, Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Dallas-Fort Worth, Orlando, Atlanta, Columbia, SC, Fort Wayne, IN, South Bend, IN, Portland, OR, Quad Cities, Buffalo, Reno, Portland, ME, Milwaukee, Albany, NY, and Scranton-Wilkes Barre, PA.

A revival of the game show Let's Make a Deal (hosted by Wayne Brady) debuted on CBS and took over the Guiding Light timeslot on October 5, 2009.

In Canada, Guiding Light was available to viewers directly through CBS-TV network affiliates from border cities or cable TV feeds until the show's ending in 2009.

TVA, a Quebec privately owned French-language television network, rebroadcast episodes in French translation, twelve months behind, for a short period in 1984.