of doctrine. Generally, he thereafter did not appear in the episode until the crisis came to a head, usually as a consultant turned to by each episode's original characters when they had exhausted their own and other "secular" resources. When Nelson Leigh , who had played that role from The Fisher Family days retired, other Lutheran ministers replaced him and the minister's role as "host" of the program was dropped. The show continued into the late 1980s, though generally broadcast in its last years mostly on local or cable Christian networks, and videotaped rather than filmed. The move away from a single, central character, even if only briefly seen, may have contributed to the series' loss of audience. The series appears to be "lost" now, or at least suppressed by the current rights' holder(s): Beyond runs on some public access stations which continue to run tapes of the series received in the past, no known re-syndications of any of its seasons or episodes in the past two decades is known, and it has never been available on home video. The success of This Is the Life resulted in several other Christian denominations producing their own religious anthology series. The most successful of these entries was Insight , which was produced by the Roman Catholic -affiliated Paulist Productions , premiering in syndication in 1960 and running for nearly 25 years.