Let's get the bad out of the way right at the top: no clips or retrospective?

It would have been nice to have a montage of past Guiding Light characters. After all, the show has been on TV since 1952, so why not take a little trip down video memory lane? It was fun to see all of the openings they've used over the decades at the start of the show (in reverse order), but it would have been good to see something at the end of the show to bookend it instead of a "The End" and then a commercial and the Tele-Next logo. Seemed kinda odd.

However, that didn't ruin the episode itself, which turned out to be everything that GL fans could have wanted and more.

Guiding Light ends this Friday. I'll have a full review up after the episode airs, but I thought this would be a good time to show not how it ends but how each episode began. Here are some of the many opening credits that the show has had over the past six decades.

The show started on TV in 1952 (from radio). Here's the 1953 opening:

A lot of Guiding Light fans are entranced by Otalia. That's not a butter substitute, it's the "Brangelina-ish" name that fans have given to Olivia and Natalia, the lesbian couple played by Crystal Chappell and Jessica Leccia. Fans won't be able to see that couple anymore, since Guiding Light will air its last episode ever on September 18. But the actresses have decided to keep the storyline alive on the web.

Though as I said above, kind of.

Imagine if, at the end of the 10-year run of Friends, Rachel ended up marrying Paul Rudd's character.

Doesn't make much sense, does it? But that's pretty much what's happening these days on Guiding Light, as it heads toward its last episode ever next month. The long romance of Reva Shayne and Josh Lewis - something that has been simmering off and on for over 25 years - has pretty much been over for a while.

But I thought that, since the show was ending, they'd start wrapping up classic storylines and actually get Reva and Josh together forever, to please fans of the show. It doesn't look like that's going to happen.

In fact, the opposite seems to be in the minds of the writers.

If you're a fan of Guiding Light (now in its final six months on the air), you probably saw Bill and Lizzie running around Universal Studios in Florida today.

They were going on the various rides, eating giant chicken legs, squirting each other with big water guns, and shooting colored balls at each other, all the while holding hands and getting all kissy (I swear there was even a scene of them getting their pictures taken in one of those photo booths).

What is this big promotion that the show and CBS is doing for Universal Studios?

Yesterday - a day usually set aside for light-hearted pranks and various other yuk-yuks - will forever be remembered now as the day that CBS got rid of Guiding Light, the longest running drama on TV (it started on radio in 1937 and TV in 1952).

It's probably the starting gun for other networks to get rid of their soap operas. It's a dying genre, either gone forever or scattered here and there on the TV landscape. It's really sad. Fans can mourn the death of a long-running network show, but a big part of pop culture is dying too. I watched the show since the late '70s/early '80s, and while I drifted away a few years ago, I've been watching it again, so it's going to be weird that it's not on anymore. I'll be recording that last episode and grabbing the inevitable collectible issue of Soap Opera Digest.

So what will CBS do now that they'll have another hour on the schedule Monday through Friday? A look at some of their options after the jump.

I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.

If you watch Guiding Light, take note of this. The show is going to change in early 2008, according to the show's producers. Say goodbye to the ordinary camera locations and the sets. The show is going for a more cinema verite'/MTV-style show, with hand-held cameras and edgier editing. They want the show to have the look of a reality show. Or something. Ugh.

I have been watching Guiding Light for 26 years.

Now, I know that I'm a guy, but you really have to blame my mother for all this. When I was around 14 or 15, I would come home from school and want to watch television. My mom would be watching her "stories," which were All My Children, One Life To Live, and Guiding Light (it used to be on in the afternoon). She wouldn't let me watch anything, so I was stuck watching Guiding Light when I got out of school...and I became hooked. I became addicted to the show, and watched it all for years, through the Philip/Beth/Rick/Mindy saga, the devious schemes of Alan Spaulding and Roger Thorpe, that bizarre story with the infected mouse that killed a bunch of characters off, Quint and Nola, Ross and Josh turning from bad to heroes, and the more recent storylines like that whole Richard and Jeffrey island kingdom stuff and Harley and Gus and Jonathan.