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 nights a week (on Monday through Fridays) in a manner similar to a daytime soap opera, instead of the once-a-week episode output common of other primetime soaps. The series, which was an adaptation of the Mexican telenovela "Alcanzar una estrella", suffered from low ratings (generally receiving less than one million viewers) and was later moved to sister cable channel TeenNick halfway through its run to burn off the remaining episodes. In 2015, Fox debuted "Empire", a primetime musical serial centering on the power struggle between family members within the titular recording company. Created by Lee Daniels and Danny Strong and