These Are My Children, written by Irna Phillips, was broadcast live on television on 31 January 1949, marking the first time a continuing daytime serial drama was aired. The experiment was not a success, and it quietly disappeared about a month later. Phillips was undeterred, going on to create television shows that ran for more than half a century. [1]
Irna Phillips was born on 1 July 1901 in Chicago, Illinois, the youngest of ten children in a German-Jewish family. Her early years were shaped by loss and responsibility: her father died when she was eight, leaving her mother to raise a large household alone. From an early age, Phillips turned to storytelling, inventing elaborate narratives for her dolls and developing a fascination with character and continuity that would later define her extraordinary career in radio and television storytelling.
After studying drama and journalism at the University of Illinois, Phillips brought her theatrical training and narrative instincts to the world of broadcast writing. Her professional breakthrough came in 1930 with Painted Dreams, a daily radio serial broadcast in Chicago, and generally considered to be radio’s first soap opera. Phillips wrote every episode herself, while also performing in the program – an extraordinary feat of stamina and discipline.
By 1943, only about 10 years after she began her writing career, Phillips was responsible for five different daytime dramas, including Guiding Light, Road of Life, Today’s Children, and Women in White (the first hospital soap). She was writing them all; her literary output was estimated to be about two million words a year, the equivalent of 40 novels.
When television emerged, Phillips turned to the new medium, creating As the World Turns and Another World. Her radio serials moved to television, and she collaborated to develop Days of Our Lives, which first aired in 1965 and — as of 2026 — remains in production, with new seasons commissioned.
Phillips’ writing reshaped daytime broadcasting. Her serials were structured around long-form storytelling, emotional realism, and complex female characters, offering narratives that unfolded day by day, year by year. She crafted her scripts aloud, dictating them while acting out each part, an immersive process that kept character and dialogue sharply alive, and was known for cliffhanger endings and the use of organ music. She was one of the first to use the plot devices of the amnesiac and murder trials.
Irna Phillips was a fiercely independent entrepreneur who retained ownership rights to all her series. She did not marry, but adopted two children and died in December 1973, aged 72.
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