Can You Remember the Name of TV’s Very First Soap Opera?

Irna Phillips, known as the “Queen of the Soaps” created the very first daytime soap opera and paved the way for tons of other soaps, even though the concept didn’t sit well with audiences and critics at first. On January 31, 1949, These Are My Children premiered on NBC in Chicago and only aired for 24 days before it was pulled from the air.

Philips was a soap opera writer for the radio and an aspiring actress when she was given the chance to create her first television show. Before she created the very first TV soap opera, she created the first soap opera on the radio, a program called Painted Dreams in 1930. Her writing involved a lot of cliffhangers and melodramatic characters that are now crucial to this brand of TV.