Irna Phillips’ These Are My Children was the start of the soap opera evolution in the 40’s. Phillips created the genre of soap opera with cliffhangers, middle-class professionals as main characters, and melodramatic background music.

On this day, January 31, in 1949, These Are My Children is the first soap opera broadcast by a major television network, NBC. This series was centralized around an Irish woman and her family, who lived in a Chicago boarding house. Each show was 15 minutes long and aired Monday thru Friday at 5pm. Failing to capture attention from critics, the soap opera was a failure and was cancelled a month later. The Television World paper was extremely displeased with the show and claimed “there is no space on television for this type of program.”

Despite Phillips’ previous failure, she continued to produce soap operas that later became popular in many households. Her legacy as a prolific writer not only planted the soap opera seed, but also has made her the “mother” of popular daytime drama.