Happy Birthday to the Mother of Soap Operas!

Irna Phillips was born 108 years ago today!

The universally recognized originator of one of television’s most enduring–and profitable–television genres, Irna Phillips is responsible for the daytime drama as we know it today. Her contributions to one format are unprecedented in television history. Television comedy had many parents– Ernie Kovacs, Jackie Gleason; TV drama had early shapers in Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling, Reginald Rose and others. But the soap opera had only one mother and she was it. She founded an entire industry based on her techniques, beliefs and the ongoing, interlocking stories that she dreamed……..

Today daytime is populated with the programs she created: As the World Turns, Another World, Days of Our Lives, and The Guiding Light. Guiding Light has now set the record as the longest running series in broadcasting history. Many other soaps on the air were created by those who began their careers working for Phillips: Bill Bell and All My Children creator Agnes Nixon.

Phillips believed her success was based on her focus on character rather than on overly complicated plots and her exploration of universal themes: self-preservation, sex, and family. She said in 1965, “None of us is different, except in degree. None of us is a stranger to success and failure, life and death, the need to be loved, the struggle to communicate.”

Read more at The Museum of Broadcast Communications.

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