There's no need to panic, but America is in danger of exhausting its supply of soap opera episodes

Everybody has had a different moment when they realized that the virus was a big deal, whether it was while waiting in line to get into a grocery store, seeing their local theater closed, or watching as the NBA canceled its season, but there are definitely some people out there whose moment just came today: As reported by Vulture, the country is about to exhaust its supply of new soap opera episodes. The Young And The Restless and The Bold And The Beautiful have been shut down since March in order to protect the cast and crew from spreading the coronavirus, and by Thursday of this week both shows will run out of episodes that they were able to tape before sending everyone home.

With productions presumably going to remain suspended for the foreseeable future, this is pretty much it for a while as far as soaps go. But, there’s no need to start rioting in the streets yet, flipping over cars as you scream for more Young and more Restless, as CBS will be filling the hole left by the two shows with theme weeks of classic episodes, documentary specials, and new commentaries and introductions from the casts. Based on the Vulture story, it sounds like the plans for this are pretty fluid, with CBS intending to figure things out as they quarantine goes on.

As for the other networks, Vulture says General Hospital on ABC has started padding out new episodes with more footage from old episodes in order to stretch out the new stuff that it has, while NBC has banked enough episodes of Days Of Our Lives to last further into the summer—at least until the Olympics, which would’ve given Days Of Our Lives a two-week hiatus to bank more episodes if it hadn’t been postponed to next year. We’re all living on borrowed time now, at least as far as new soap opera episodes are concerned.