What was the first soap opera in America?

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What was the first soap opera in america?

"Painted Dreams," was the first soap opera created originally for radio.

Soap opera grew out of American commercial radio in the late 1920s, when all the smaller stations were being hooked up to make two large, rival national networks, (NBC and CBS). Once all Americans were able to hear the same programs, advertisers began searching for the series that would be most effective at selling their products. Hugely popular were the daily 15-minute romantic dramas. They were sponsored by the big soap firms (Procter and Gamble, Lever Brothers, and Colgate-Palmolive) and so the name “soap opera” was coined: “soap” for the products advertised, “opera” referring to the larger-than-life plots.

Probably the first true soap opera was Painted Dreams, about Mother Moran and her children, created by Irna Phillips, then a young teacher from Dayton, Ohio. Broadcast in 1930 on WGN, a local Chicago station, no sponsor took it up and it soon closed. Phillips continued to write and in the next decade became successful and prolific, sometimes working at one time on six soap operas. Perhaps her most famous is The Guiding Light, created in 1937 for radio but still running today.

Frank Hummert, a former advertising copywriter in New York, and his wife Anne, also began experimenting with radio serials in Chicago. Their first effort was A Stolen Husband, in 1931, and then Betty and Bob, the first national soap, about a secretary who married her boss and was shunned by his rich family.

Radio soaps had been running for almost two decades when the American Dumont TV network began to try out versions on television in 1944. Lever Brothers also tested the new market and found good results, although romantic stories relying on fantasies did not convert from one medium to another. It was not until 1949, though, that networked series were commissioned to be screened in the afternoons. Notable successes were Irna Phillips's These are my Children, screened by NBC in 1949, and the CBS show The First Hundred Years in 1950. CBS went on to have hits with Search for Tomorrow, As the World Turns, and half a dozen more, all featuring women heroines at home during the 1950s.