Today in History—January 31: How a Flop Started Daytime Television

On this day in 1949, the first daytime TV soap opera premiered—and flopped.

These Are My Children was broadcast live on NBC, marking the first time a continuing daytime serial drama was carried on a major network. The 15-minute daily program focused on Mrs. Henehan, an Irish widow running a boardinghouse in Chicago, along with the exploits of her family and lodgers.

Written by Irna Phillips, a pioneer of melodrama-rich radio storytelling, the experiment was…decidedly not a success.

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One reviewer in Television World magazine panned: “There is no place on television for this type of program. A blank screen is preferable.” (Television said “Challenge accepted!” and invented reality TV.)

These Are My Children quietly disappeared from the air about a month later. But its failure mattered less than its ambition. Phillips was undeterred—completely undaunted, even—and went on to create such hits as Guiding Light, Days of Our Lives, and As the World Turns, effectively inventing the blueprint for daytime television. Viewers would soon make a habit of tuning in every day, just to see what happened next.

Her real life was pretty soapy too: The youngest of 10 children, she never married, she adopted two children, and she described her numerous love affairs in her memoir. At work, she demanded that actors stay in character at all times, causing a few resignations and at least one nervous breakdown. She composed by dictating her scripts and acting them out: She reported that her secretaries always knew which character she was playing. When executives rejected her idea for a serial adaptation of Love Is a Many Splendored Thing because it featured an interracial romance, Phillips quit.

Along the way she introduced television tropes so familiar now that we don’t even notice them: amnesia as a plot device, cliffhanger endings, and characters speaking to the audience via voice-over. She’s the one who taught TV to linger over a cup of coffee.

She proved that the blank screen was not, in fact, preferable after all. TV just needed a woman who understood that viewers would come back tomorrow if she gave them a reason.

Famous Birthdays

1797: Franz Schubert—Austrian composer

1919: Jackie Robinson—American baseball player

1893: Freya Stark—British travel writer

1981: Justin Timberlake—American singer and actor