The Young and the Restless Off-Screen Storytelling Poses Difficulties

So many things happen off-screen on The Young and the Restless these days that it can be difficult to get too invested in what we DO see. We understand that sometimes it’s for budgeting or other concerns, but sometimes it truly doesn’t make sense what we end up hearing about but never shown.

Young and the Restless Off Screen Doesn’t Cut It

For instance, we’re hearing about how poorly Connor Newman (Judah Mackey) is handling Rey Rosales’s (Jordi Vilasuso) death. While we realize younger actors don’t spend as much time filming as the older ones, it’s difficult to get overly invested in the storyline when we aren’t seeing it. We barely even feel like we saw Rey and Chelsea Lawson’s (Melissa Claire Egan) friendship truly develop.

Speaking of Rey, we suspect that Sharon Rosales’s (Sharon Case) quickie Genoa City memorial for her late husband will happen…you guessed it…off-screen. Just like his funeral in Miami, which of course, makes more sense, but we still don’t love it. In fact, much of Sharon and Rey’s relationship happened where we didn’t see it, which makes it difficult for us to truly feel and reconcile her pain at losing him. Similarly, her cancer fight wasn’t played out. Instead, the characters talked about what happened.

Even further, now that he’s gone, we hear that Rey worked hard to provide a surprise for Tessa Porter (Cait Fairbanks) and Mariah Copeland (Camryn Grimes) for their wedding in the form of Tessa’s sister Crystal Porter. Of course, we didn’t get to see any of this happen, and we’re just now hearing about it instead. These types of things make it more difficult for viewers to get attached to certain arcs, and it doesn’t do much to help flesh out characters on the soap. We suspect we’ll see even more of this as Chance Chancellor (Conner Floyd) works on his late partner’s cases in the coming weeks.

What do you think? Is there still too much telling versus showing on Y&R these days? Let us know in the comments below.

The Young and the Restless (YR) airs weekdays on CBS. Check your local listings for airtimes. For more about what’s coming up in Genoa City, check out all the latest that’s been posted on Y&R spoilers, and for an in-depth look at the show’s history, click here.