January 31, 1949
Selling Soap
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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth. To generate interest in the Centennial, this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Irna Phillips was the youngest of ten children, born in 1901 to a large Jewish family on Chicago’s West Side.
Irna’s girlhood dreams of becoming an actress seemed dashed when acting schools rejected her, for what she later attributed to her plain looks and nasal voice. Instead, she earned a teaching degree from the University of Illinois, but did go on to study drama at the Universities of Wisconsin and Iowa.
In 1930, Irna was freelancing at Chicago radio station WGN1 when she drew on her own family experience to create Painted Dreams, a 15-minute radio drama featuring an Irish-American widow and her multigenerational household.
WGN executives were skeptical that a daily serial about anything as prosaic as family life could attract listeners or advertisers, but Phillips persisted until WGN agreed to a trial run that went on the air on October 20, 1930. To everyone’s surprise, the audience response was immediate and enthusiastic. Painted Dreams quickly became a fixture on the station’s schedule. Irna Phillips herself starred as the widowed matriarch, Mother Moynihan, whose relationship with her daughter provided emotional resonance to the everyday drama.
Even though Painted Dreams was a hit for WGN, the station’s executives resisted Phillips appeals to take the show into national syndication. And, despite their reluctance, the station claimed ownership of the show and all its characters. Phillips abruptly left WGN in 1931 and sued the station for the rights to her creation in 1932.2
A Genre Is Born…
Phillips took her concept to WMAQ, the NBC-owned Chicago station where executives were much friendlier to the show’s commercial prospects. With the ownership and control of Painted Dreams in dispute, Phillips reworked her creation with new characters and storylines. Renamed Today’s Children, WMAQ began airing the retooled program on March 11, 1933.
By early 1934, Today’s Children was being broadcast over the NBC network to a national audience. The show caught the attention of advertising executives at Proctor & Gamble, the largest manufacturer of household products in the country, and one of the most influential advertisers radio. P&G could readily see the potential in Phillips’ serialized storytelling aimed at homemakers.
Once Proctor & Gamble signed on to Irna Phillips’ creation, the conception of a new genre was complete. Daily serials aimed at a largely female audience became known as “soap operas.”
Today’s Children ran until NBC chose not to renew it in 1937, but that did not deter Irna Phillips. Before Today’s Children aired its final episode, Phillips had already conjured up her next project. The Guiding Light premiered on WMAQ January 25, 1937. The story of Rev. John Ruthledge mined themes from Phillips’ own struggles with faith. After switching to the CBS radio network in 1947, it and ran every weekday until 1956.3
Before its cancellation, Today’s Children had reached a large national audience. It also caught the attention of executives at NBC, who called on Phillips when their attention turned toward original daytime programming for television. The network gave her the green light on an entirely new program.
…and comes to TV
The soap opera came to television when NBC’s flagship Chicago TV station WNBQ began airing daily episodes of These Are My Children at 5:00 PM on January 31, 1949.
Phillips borrowed elements from her earlier creations, Painted Dreams and Today’s Children, for the new show. Norman Felton, a Chicago-based producer/director, ran the show’s day-to-day production as it followed another Irish widow, this one named Mrs. Henehan, and her boarding-house family.
For reasons both creative and technical, These Are My Children aired for only five weeks, until March 4, 1949. One issue that arose was AT&Ts limitations on using its coaxial cable for weekday Chicago-to-East Coast television distribution. That undermined NBCs commitment to producing programs out of Chicago rather New York.
Though short-lived, These Are My Children was the first daytime serial created specifically for television, and the die was cast for one of the medium’s most enduring formats.
Other networks quickly followed suit. On February 21, 1949, the DuMont Network launched a daytime drama called A Woman to Remember, which ran until early July, 1949. On December 4, 1950, The First Hundred Years premiered on CBS – the first daytime serial with a multi-year run, until June 27, 1952.
The daytime drama format did not really find firm footing until Phillips herself brought her well established radio program, The Guiding Light to TV in 1952. That was followed by As The World Turns, and soon an entire afternoon lineup of soap operas filled the schedule.
The Guiding Light premiered on CBS on June 30, 1952, making it the first daytime serial drama to air simultaneously on radio and TV. When the last TV episode faded to black on September 18, 2009, it left the air as the longest-running drama in broadcast history, spanning more than seven decades across two platforms.
A 1953 episode of The Guiding Light can be found on YouTube
Irna Phillips pioneered familiar narrative devices like the organ music fade-out, cliffhangers, overlapping dialogue, and the use of inner monologues. If she is remembered today as the “Mother of The Soap Opera,” then she was a fruitful parent. Among her prolific heirs was Agnes Nixon, with whom Phillips created Days of Our Lives, which is widely regarded as the most popular soap opera of all time.
Pushing The Envelope
In addition to co-creating Days of Our Lives with Phillips, Nixon is responsible for such long running daytime serials as One Life to Live (1968), All My Children (1970), and Loving (1983)
Agnes Nixon pushed the envelope of daytime storytelling by introducing controversial contemporary topics like racism, abortion, AIDS, Vietnam, sexual identity, and domestic abuse – long before these subjects were common in mainstream TV. Nixon’s forté was strong, complex female characters that kept the genre relevant for a new generation of audiences.4 In short, if Phillips invented the form, Nixon elevated and modernized it – bringing relevance, diversity, and cultural urgency to the world of daytime drama.
Many of Irna Phillips’ and Agnes Nixon’s successors live on to this day. Days of Our Lives has been on NBC since 1965 and has brought the genre to its streaming service, Peacock; General Hospital has been on ABC since 1963 (who can forget Luke and Laura’s Wedding in 1981?); The Young and The Restless, created by William J. Bell, has aired on CBS since 1973; and The Bold and the Beautiful, created by William J. Bell and his wife Lee Phillip Bell in 1987 is one of the most-watched programs in the world with a global audience of 30+ million.
Some of the conventions that Irna Phillips and Agnes Nixon pioneered soon spilled into primetime. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the serialized drama found its way into primetime. Dallas became a cultural juggernaut, drawing international notoriety when more than 80 million people tuned in to learn “Who Shot J.R.?” Knots Landing followed, along with Dynasty, which turned excess into art and gave viewers something glamorous to gossip about. These shows borrowed the emotional core of daytime soaps and dressed it up in oil wealth, fashion, and melodrama.
Just as the soaps reached zenith in the late 1970s and early 80s, the genre turned on itself with satire and parody.
From 1977 to 1981, ABC’s primetime Soap skewered the genre’s conventions—affairs, amnesia, secret twins—while still managing to tell emotionally grounded stories. Soap also starred Billy Crystal as one of television’s first openly gay characters, and handled sensitive topics with surprising grace for a comedy in that era.
Even Norman Lear (creator of All In The Family, etc.) got into the act with a short-lived prime-time soap opera satire called Mary Hartman Mary Hartman. Louise Lasser portrayed Mary as a neurotic, overwhelmed housewife navigating bizarre and often disturbing events in her small-town life (while hanging up: “I can’t talk to you right now, I’m on the phone…”). Lear syndicated the show to local stations around the country who aired it in late-night time slots, typically around 11:00 PM. The unusual scheduling—essentially creating a “prime-time soap opera” that wasn’t on a network—was part of producer Lear’s strategy to bypass network censors and reach a more experimental, boundary-pushing tone. Mary Hartman Mary Hartman ran 235 episodes from January, 1976 until Mary “left town” in May, 1977.
1 WGN (AM 720) was one of a few dozen “clear channel” radio stations in the U.S., authorized by the FCC to broadcast at up to 50,000 watts with no other stations on the same frequency for hundreds of miles. These powerful signals served vast areas, especially rural communities and particularly at night, when AM signals can travel hundreds of miles.
WGN, owned by the Chicago Tribune (the call letters stood for “World’s Greatest Newspaper”), gave the paper enormous regional influence during the golden age of radio in the 1920s and 1930s.
2 Painted Dreams did eventually land a sponsor—Mickleberry Products Company—late in 1931, The show ran until July 1943 and went on to inspire dozens more by Phillips and her protégés.
3 For a time in the early 1950s, Irna Phillips had shows on both NBC and CBS, which was not unusual in that era. Unlike today’s more exclusive network deals, television and radio writers often worked across multiple networks, especially if they were as prolific and in-demand as Phillips.
4 Not the least among Agnes Nixon’s creations was Erica Kane, the long suffering heroine of All My Children performed for 41 years by Susan Lucci. Lucci brought her own behind the scenes drama to the genre: She was nominated for a daytime Emmy Award 19 times before finally taking home the trophy in 1999.
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