To accommodate the new in-house serial Where the Heart Is, starting on September 8, 1969, CBS moved Love of Life ahead 30 minutes to 11:30/10:30, which put it against the highly popular Hollywood Squares.

This led to a major win for NBC in 1971 by having Hollywood Squares, Jeopardy!, and the serial Days of Our Lives reach the top five of all daytime programs.

In September 1979, a new, daily, syndicated version of Match Game was introduced; in some markets, the show was aired against or, on CBS affiliates, in place of Love of Life.

Many West Coast stations, such as KNXT (now KCBS-TV) in Los Angeles, did this, as well, keeping Love of Life in tandem with the other soaps by airing it at 2:30 Pacific time, after Guiding Light.

Within 10 months, CBS realized that the 4:00 slot did not work for Love of Life in light of affiliate tape-delays and pre-emptions, and subsequently cancelled the show.

The following Monday, The Young and the Restless expanded to an hour, with One Day at a Time moving into the 4:00/3:00 timeslot airing in most markets following Guiding Light.

Meg was the schemer and all-around "bad" girl, as well as the mother of "Beanie" (later "Ben") Harper, originally played by Dennis Parnell.

The show was painted black-and-white in this regard, which was evident in the tagline recited at the beginning of each of the earlier episodes: "Love of Life: The exciting story of Vanessa Dale and her courageous struggle for human dignity."

Peters admitted that, during the wedding reception scenes afterward, she did not know the names of all the characters who were interacting with Vanessa, so she called everyone "dear".

The late 1960s involved attempts to shake up the somewhat staid atmosphere through campus unrest and a return of Vanessa's first husband, who had been killed off in the mid-1950s.

Under the reins of Claire Labine and Paul Avila Mayer, the show returned to the original "good Vanessa, bad Meg" theme.

In one episode, Meg called her son's newborn daughter Suzanne a "bastard", one of the first times the word was spoken on daytime television.

Emphasis was increased on gritty story lines (for example, Ben, now played by Chandler Hill Harben, was nearly raped while in prison serving time for bigamy), but these were not warmly received by the audience, and the ratings dropped.

In 1976, Rick Latimer (Jerry Lacy) and his wife Cal (Roxanne Gregory) welcomed a young vet Michael Blake (Richard E. Council) into their garage apartment.

The final shot of the series was of longtime director Larry Auerbach, portfolio in hand, walking through the empty sets and out the CBS Broadcast Center Studio 41 gate, as Tony Bennett's "We'll Be Together Again" played.