Still 'Young,' still 'Restless'
Admittedly, some critics passed on "The Young and the Restless" panel, since the 33-year-old show is still going strong, and not every TV critic covers soaps. (I've met a writer from Soaps In Depth here, and teased him about how he'd better rule this panel.) But I admit, I've been watching the show on and off since 1983 or so, so I was not about to skip.

"Y&R" has made some news of late, with über-villain Victor Newman developing a pleasing personality that's about to be attributed to temporal lobe epilepsy. (Victor couldn't be mooning over a puppy just out of the blue, now, could he? The man who once locked his wife's lover in his cellar?) New head writer Lynn Marie Latham explained that a friend's daughter suffered from the condition, and that at least in part inspired Victor's predicament. She also confided that the plotline won't be discarded easily, seeing it carrying on for a year or more.

No one was willing to reveal the show's biggest secret -- who's the father of Phyllis Abbott's baby, her husband Jack (his portrayer, Peter Bergman, was on the panel), or young upstart Nicholas Newman, Victor's scion. But here are some other tidbits soap fans may appreciate.

• When asked for favorite storylines, Tracey E. Bregman, who plays Lauren Fenmore Baldwin, confessed that she enjoyed her early days, when she played a definitively witchy character (didn't she once dump a milkshake or some other food on the head of Traci Abbott, her plumper rival for Danny Romalotti? I've got to check that with my new Soaps In Depth pal, but that's how I remember it.) But Bregman also says her current storyline, where she's sharing a new marriage and later-in-life pregnancy with the character Michael Baldwin, is a favorite.
• Don Diamont, who plays Brad Carlton, the pool boy turned executive, also said his current storyline is his favorite, and for good reason. Brad's past life has been a blank slate on the show until recently, when it's turned out that his name's not really Brad Carlton and nothing else about his past is as it appears, either. His favorite past storyline, however, was when he was locked in a cage by his kooky ex-wife, Lisa of the pre-Raphaelite curls. Hey, who hasn't had that happen? We can all relate, right?
• The cast members on the panel all had high praise for new head writer Latham, especially appreciating how she's thrown herself into studying up on the show's tangled past and resurrecting some plotlines (Brad's mysterious past) that longtime viewers remember. But they're also thankful to her for adding a basketball court set to their show. "Someday, somebody's gonna get hurt," Bergman warned. And Diamont confessed that when Latham innocently said to him that she'd heard that Joshua Morrow (Nicholas) was a good basketball player, he had to proudly report on testing Morrow's skills on the court. The result? "I smoked him," Diamont claimed proudly.