A Chicago woman created soap operas.
And a Chicago woman is keeping them alive.
First, let me introduce you to Irna Phillips. She revolutionized television and hardly gets enough credit. Born in 1901 and raised in a large Chicago family, she started off wanting to be an actress but was deemed too plain. Phillips accidentally ended up writing for the booming radio medium. While working at WGN Radio, the bosses asked her if she would write a daily narrative, scripted show for women.
In 1930, “Painted Dreams” debuted five days a week, and thus Phillips birthed the genre known as the daytime serial. She was an ambitious and independent woman who pushed to take her show nationwide. WGN didn’t agree, so Phillips left the station for WMAQ Radio in 1932 to develop “Today’s Children.” It was pretty much a remake of “Painted Dream” with the same characters.
Phillips wrote women-centered stories and characters based on her own life. She eschewed the storybook fantasy ending. She wrote of a strong matriarch, like her mother, going through trials and tribulations. Phillips observed that listeners “like to see reflected more or less their own problems, their own conflicts, their own heartache, their hopes and their own dreams.” Everything isn’t happiness, she quipped.
Phillips lived a few blocks away from The People’s Church in Chicago, which is still around today. Founder and Pastor Preston Bradley served as inspiration for “The Guiding Light” in 1937. The fictional Rev. Ruthledge was the moral figure who provided a “guiding light” for the fictional working-class neighborhood of white ethnic groups based on Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood.
Success followed. Daytime serials dominated radio, and Phillips usually had three of her shows in the top 10. In post-World War II America, commercial goods companies wanted to tap into the domesticity of the white middle class. They realized the daytime serial could be a conduit to their customers. Soap detergents became sponsors, and the daytime serials colloquially became known as “soap operas.”
Then the advent of television changed broadcasting. “The Guiding Light” was the only radio soap to transition to TV. Phillips introduced the “cliffhanger” storytelling device and the mercurial female vixen character who still lives on the small screen today. Think reality TV or a Shonda Rhimes drama.
The TV shows Phillips originated or developed included “Another World,” “As the World Turns” and “Days of Our Lives.” This so-called low-brow entertainment for women reaped in most of the money from the 1960s through the 1980s on all three networks; at the peak, 19 soaps were on the air.
Not all of them flowed from Phillips’ imagination. But she established the blueprint. For 43 years Phillips reigned as the queen of soaps until her death in 1973. Her proteges Agnes Nixon and William Bell (along with his wife Lee) went on to create “One Life to Live,” “All My Children,” “The Young and the Restless” and “The Bold and the Beautiful.”
‘Campy’ but also touching on serious, relevant matters
My late paternal grandmother watched “The Guiding Light” on CBS. Most soap-watching origin stories begin with a grandmother, babysitter and a VCR. In my house, we watched ABC soaps with my mother and babysitter. Two networks grabbed my attention.
We age with the characters. They die and give birth. We watch their drama as if they were extended relatives. Intergenerational storylines with core families appeal to intergeneration viewers.
To call a program “soapy” is a slur. Because of that reputation, soaps pushed boundaries outside the mainstream without much of the public paying attention.
Susan Lucci, who played Erica Kane, is flanked on the left by the late Ray MacDonnell, who played the role of Dr. Joe Martin, and the late David Canary, who portrayed both Adam and Stuart Chandler, in the ABC daytime drama, “All My Children.” They’re celebrating the taping of the 9,000th episode of the show in 2004, in New York. The show last aired on ABC Sept. 23, 2011, and was briefly revived as a web series in 2013.
Jennifer Szymaszek/AP
Yes, soaps can be deliciously campy, but that’s not the sum of their parts. Daytime soaps are a genre to consider gendered identity, post-feminism and consumerism. (After all, Procter & Gamble was a sponsor.) In the early years, soaps reflected questions around post-war domesticity. By 1970, Vietnam War dissent was a storyline. Uterine cancer and a Black woman “passing” for white were 1960s and 1970s storylines. In 1964, a character on “Another World” had an illegal abortion. In 1971, vixen Erica Kane on “All My Children” had an abortion. She wasn’t downtrodden. She was a married model who didn’t want a baby. Gay teens in the 1990s. Same sex marriage in the aughts .
Today five soaps remain — “General Hospital,” “Days of Our Lives,” “The Young and the Restless” and “The Bold and the Beautiful.” The fifth one debuted in February.
So about that Chicago woman who is keeping soaps alive?
Michele Val Jean, a South Side native and soap writer veteran, is behind “Beyond the Gates,” which features a wealthy Black family. People have been declaring soaps are dead for decades, but this one made a splash. I’m an avid watcher (I never relinquished my habit from childhood), and it turns out my demographic is the target audience; 40% of daytime soap watchers are Black women.
On this new soap, we see ourselves in front-burner storylines, not sidekicks. Hair is on point. Makeup matches skin tone and Easter eggs abound — like the Tougaloo College, an HBCU, diploma hanging in a doctor’s office.
I can’t wait to see what boundaries “Beyond the Gates” will push, just as other soaps have done for 90-plus years. Soaps were never just for housewives — and just like Phillips — they deserve more recognition, even if some of those characters had evil twins, amnesia or had returned from the dead.
Natalie Y. Moore is a senior lecturer at Northwestern University and host of WBEZ’s new soap-centric podcast, Stories Without End. Episodes drop every Tuesday for six weeks starting April 8. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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