The show was originally developed under the working title 'The Innocent Years' before creators William J. Bell and Lee Phillip Bell renamed it The Young and the Restless to reflect the youth and mood of the early 1970s.

The fictional setting of Genoa City was named after the real town of Genoa City, Wisconsin, located between the Bells' Chicago home and their summer vacation spot in Lake Geneva.

For the show's debut, creator William J. Bell and executive producer John Conboy auditioned 540 actors to fill the 13 main roles, assembling the youngest cast ever hired for a soap opera at the time.

Eric Braeden's character Victor Newman was originally written as a despicable, unfaithful wife-abuser who was meant to be killed off after just eight to twelve weeks, but Bell was so impressed by Braeden's performance that he rewrote the story to keep the character and put him on contract.

Kimberlin Brown's villainous character Sheila Carter was presumed to have died in a fire on The Young and the Restless but was successfully revived and crossed over to sister soap The Bold and the Beautiful in 1992.

When the series expanded from a half-hour to a full hour in 1980, several original cast members left because their contracts only covered half-hour episodes, forcing Bell to phase out the original core families in favor of new ones like the Abbotts and Williamses.

Exterior locations used in the late 1980s and early 1990s included real sites around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, such as Allegheny General Hospital and the Duquesne Club; when a character's death was filmed in the Richland, Pennsylvania area, the local police chief was reportedly not informed and believed the accident had actually occurred.

The show's theme song, 'Nadia's Theme,' was originally composed as 'Cotton's Dream' for the 1971 film Bless the Beasts and Children, and was renamed after ABC's Wide World of Sports used it for a montage of gymnast Nadia Comăneci's routines at the 1976 Summer Olympics, even though she never actually performed to that music.

The Young and the Restless became the first daytime soap opera to be broadcast in high-definition, starting June 27, 2001.