These Are My Children (1949)

Genre

soap opera

Country

United States

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This is a short-lived live television soap opera about a group of characters and their everyday personal dramas. It originally aired in 1949 as a daily 15 minute program from Chicago.

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What happens

These Are My Children is an American television soap opera, or novella, that ran on NBC from January 31 to March 4, 1949. The show was broadcast live from WNBQ in Chicago, Illinois, airing 15 minutes a day, five days a week, at 5 p.m. EST. It is widely credited as the first soap opera broadcast on television. It may be more accurately described as the first daytime drama or the first soap opera strip, as it was preceded by DuMont series Faraway Hill in 1946 and Highway to the Stars in 1947, both of which are described as soap operas but aired later in the evenings and broadcast only once a week; Guiding Light had also been in production for 12 years once These Are My Children debuted, but only as a radio series - its TV version did not debut until 1952. Created by Irna Phillips and directed by Norman Felton, the show was based in large part on Phillips' early radio soaps Today's Children and Painted Dreams. In addition to critical opinions, the immediate factor in NBC's cancellation of These Are My Children was the decision by AT&T Corporation to end use of its coaxial cable for weekday eastbound distribution of programs originating in Chicago. Simultaneously executives of NBC "had found fault with the program" while they wanted to have more shows originate in New York rather than in Chicago or on the West Coast. Phillips later created many popular daytime dramas, and Felton produced primetime soaps Dr. Kildare and Executive Suite. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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