Serial (radio and television) usually ran from Monday through Friday at exactly the same time every day. A show called The Smith Family which ran only one night a week on WENR in Chicago during the early 1930s was credited as the "great-granddaddy of the soap operas" by radio historian Francis Chase, Jr. One of the other shows that helped pioneer the daytime soap opera/serial was "The Guiding Light", which debuted on NBC radio in 1937, and then switched to CBS Television in 1952. "The Guiding Light" final episode aired on September 18, 2009, having a total of 15,762 episodes air on CBS. Some
Soap opera opera met with negative reviews, but eventually proved critics wrong with nearly 13 million viewers tuning in each week. Even though the format proved successful, it was not until 1992 before "Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten" became the first German daily soap opera. Early ratings were bad as were the reviews, but the RTL network was willing to give its first soap opera a chance; ratings would improve, climbing to 7 million viewers by 2002. Not long after "Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten", Das Erste introduced "Marienhof", which aired twice a week. After successfully creating the first German daily soap, production company