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Podcast: Today In History with The Retrospectors
Episode: TV's First Soap Opera
Description: These Are My Children premiered on NBC on 31st January, 1949; the world's first televised soap opera. It lasted only four weeks on air, was broadcast live, and had a tiny budget, but influenced the production of the genre for decades. As dramas primarily created by and for women, soap operas typically attracted sniffy reviews from male critics, yet proved enormously popular with their initial audience of 1950s housewives. Creator Irna Phillips’ own backstory mirrored the dramatic storylines she wrote, and many of the situations she introduced into her productions - illegitimate children, amnesiac medical patients - wer...