Billy Abbott and Sally Spectra finally say their vows on The Young and the Restless starting Friday, October 16, in episodes set at the Genoa City Athletic Club, which has been dressed in a Jazz Age, Great Gatsby style for the occasion. CBS is running the ceremony across two episodes, ending on Monday, October 19 with a finale the network is promoting as a shock. The build-up began on October 12, the day the soap opened its 54th season.
Jason Thompson, who plays Billy, has already confirmed the couple do get married. He has also hinted that the day will not stay romantic for long, telling a TV listings magazine that events at the ceremony shift the direction of the story and that the fallout could run for a decade or two.
Who Billy and Sally are, for anyone who has not watched since the 1990s
Billy is one of the show’s oldest homegrown characters. Creator William J. Bell wrote him in as the son of businessman John Abbott and Jill Abbott, and he first appeared as a baby on July 7, 1993. Child actors played him until 1999, when the show aged him into a teenager, and six actors have played him since then, some of them twice. Thompson, a former General Hospital star, took over on January 13, 2016, and won the Daytime Emmy for lead actor in 2020.
Billy arrives at this wedding with a long marital record. His 2003 marriage to Mackenzie Browning was annulled when the pair learned they were apparently cousins. He married Chloe Mitchell after she had his daughter Delia, and his on-off marriages to Victoria Newman include an invalid 2010 ceremony, a legal one later that year and a remarriage in December 2011. The deepest wound in his story is Delia’s death in 2013, struck by a car driven by Adam Newman, a fact worth holding onto, because Adam is on this week’s guest list.
Sally comes from the sister soap, The Bold and the Beautiful, where Courtney Hope introduced her in January 2017 as the grandniece of the original Sally Spectra, a role made famous by Darlene Conley. Hope moved the character to Genoa City on November 3, 2020, and won a Daytime Emmy for supporting actress in 2024. In Genoa City, Sally has dated Jack Abbott, Billy’s much older brother, and Adam Newman, which is why her choice of groom carries so much history.
The pairing itself is fairly young. In February 2025 the actors were describing a “new romance” that viewers were split on, and Thompson was frank about how soaps work: “We could be together for two years, and ultimately, the biggest payoff might be when we break up down the road.”
Who to watch at the ceremony
The guest list on the Friday and Monday episodes reads like a family tree of the show:
- Adam Newman (Mark Grossman): Sally’s ex and the driver in Delia’s death, attending as the date of Chelsea Lawson, who is one of Sally’s bridesmaids.
- Jill Abbott (Jess Walton): Billy’s estranged mother, whom he first refused to invite. Thompson has hinted that a serious development involving her shakes up the day.
- Traci and Ashley Abbott: Billy’s sisters, who executive producer Sally McDonald says hold very different views of the bride.
- Audra Charles (Zuleyka Silver): Sally’s maid of honor, who has openly opposed Chelsea’s place in the wedding party.
The show has also teased that Patty Williams, a longtime menace to the Abbotts, is at large again, and recent episodes had Sally asking for extra security at the venue.
What comes after the vows
Thompson has said that parenthood follows very fast, with a newborn arriving soon after the vows, which places a birth storyline close to the November ratings period. That month also brings a change behind the camera: material from new co-head writers Jamey Giddens and Dan O’Connor, who replaced Josh Griffith, starts airing on November 11.
In the US, the show airs weekdays on CBS and streams on Paramount+. The ceremony episodes are Friday, October 16 and Monday, October 19.
Further reading
Image: Gary Minnaert, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
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