Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round they all laughed when Edison recorded sound.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: They.
[00:00:11] Speaker A: All laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly they told Marconi Wireless was a phony it's the same old cry welcome back.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: To 100 Years of Television. This is episode 27 Countdown 80 selling soap for 100 weeks that started in October 2025. This podcast is going to recall the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027, the 100th anniversary of the day electronic video and face it, is there really any other kind first appeared on Earth.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode, the TV industry began to recognize its own outstanding achievements with the first Emmy Awards.
Today, TV starts selling soap Irna Phillips was born in 1901 to a large Jewish family on Chicago's west side, the youngest of 10 children who lost their father when Irna was just 8 years old.
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 as an actress and writer at Chicago radio station WGN when she drew on her own family experience to create Painted Dreams, a 15 minute radio drama featuring an Irish American widow and her multi generational household.
WGN executives were skeptical that a daily series about 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 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.
Painted Dreams was a hit for wgn, but the station's executives resisted Phillips appeals to take the show into national syndication.
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, 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.
WMAQ began airing the retooled program as Today's Children 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 Procter and Gamble, the nation's largest manufacturer of household products and one of the most influential advertisers in radio.
P and G could readily see the potential in Phillips serialized storytelling aimed at homemakers.
Once Procter and Gamble signed on to Erna 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 on January 25, 1937.
The story of Reverend John Ruthledge mined themes from Philip's own struggles with faith.
After switching to the CBS radio network in 1947, the Guiding Light ran every weekday until 1956.
Before its cancellation, Today's Children had reached a large national audience.
It also caught the attention of executives at NBC who called on Irna Phillips when their attention turned toward original daytime programming for television, the network gave her the green light on an entirely new program.
These Are My Children began airing daily live 15 minute episodes from NBC's flagship Chicago station. WNBQ at 5pm on January 31, 1949.
Phillips borrowed elements from her earlier creations painted dreams in Today's Children for the new show.
Norman Felton, a Chicago based producer and writer, ran the show's day to day production as it followed another Irish widow, this one named Mrs. Henahan 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&T's limitations on using its coaxial cable for for weekday Chicago to East coast television distribution. That undermined NBC's commitment to producing programs out of Chicago rather than 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 July 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 TV 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, 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.
In addition to creating Days of Our Lives with Phillips, Agnes Nixon is responsible for such long running daytime serials as One Life to Live, All My Children and Loving.
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 topics were common on mainstream tv, Nixon's forte was strong, complex female characters that kept the genre relevant for a new generation of audiences.
In short, if Irna Phillips invented the form, Agnes Nixon elevated and modernized it by 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 nearly 30 million.
Some of the storytelling 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 prime time.
Dallas became a cultural juggernaut drawing international notoriety when more than 80 million people tuned in to find out who shot J.R.
knott's 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 their zenith in the late 1970s and early 80s, the genre turned on itself with satire and parody.
From 1977 to 1981, ABC's primetime comedy Soap skewered the genre's conventions, affairs, amnesia, secret twins while still managing to tell emotionally grounded stories.
Soap starred Billy Crystal as one of television's first openly gay characters and handled sensitive topics with surprising grace for a comedy of that era.
Even Norman Lear, the creator of all in the Family and several spin offs got into the act with a short lived primetime soap opera satire called Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman Louise Lasser portrayed Mary as a neurotic, overwhelmed housewife navigating bizarre and often disturbing events in the fictional small town of Fernwood, Ohio.
Lear took an unusual approach to distributing Mary Hartman.
Rather than selling it to a network, Lear syndicated the show to local stations around the country who aired it in late nighttime slots, typically around 11pm Syndicating the show locally enabled Lear and the show's writers to bypass network sensors and reach for a more experimental, boundary pushing tone.
Mary Hartman Mary Hartman ran 235 episodes from January 1976 until Mary picked up and left town in May 1977.
This brings us to the end of number 80 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when the man who invented television begins his exit stage right.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7, 2027.
For more aim a gizmo to 100yearstv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Shatzkin. And it's a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:13:36] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy. They laughed at us and how but ho ho ho who got to laugh at now.
