
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Introducing a new podcast from WBEZ Chicago, Making: Stories Without End. Soap operas have long been trivialized as low-brow women’s entertainment. Even the term “soap” is pejorative when describing television. But there’s a deeper story to tell about the genre that changed storytelling on the small screen.
In this episode, you’ll hear about Irna Phillips, the Chicago woman who birthed the daytime serial for radio in the 1930s and ushered it onto television in the 1950s. Phillips established staples in the genre like the cliff-hanger; she was a prolific writer who knew the daytime audience wanted to see their own problems in stories. As she summed it up in 1947: “[T]heir own conflicts, their own heartache, their hopes and their own dreams. Everything isn't happiness, is it? No.”
Follow the rest of the season by searching Making: Stories Without End.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
4.7
378378 ratings
Introducing a new podcast from WBEZ Chicago, Making: Stories Without End. Soap operas have long been trivialized as low-brow women’s entertainment. Even the term “soap” is pejorative when describing television. But there’s a deeper story to tell about the genre that changed storytelling on the small screen.
In this episode, you’ll hear about Irna Phillips, the Chicago woman who birthed the daytime serial for radio in the 1930s and ushered it onto television in the 1950s. Phillips established staples in the genre like the cliff-hanger; she was a prolific writer who knew the daytime audience wanted to see their own problems in stories. As she summed it up in 1947: “[T]heir own conflicts, their own heartache, their hopes and their own dreams. Everything isn't happiness, is it? No.”
Follow the rest of the season by searching Making: Stories Without End.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
9,167 Listeners
90,729 Listeners
8,251 Listeners
11,909 Listeners
59,003 Listeners
4,098 Listeners
23,906 Listeners
2,080 Listeners
16,063 Listeners
570 Listeners
14,298 Listeners
5,069 Listeners
3,435 Listeners
404 Listeners
75 Listeners
4,422 Listeners
80 Listeners
1,210 Listeners
232 Listeners
214 Listeners
490 Listeners
256 Listeners
433 Listeners
147 Listeners
372 Listeners
332 Listeners
96 Listeners
8,939 Listeners
80 Listeners
1,752 Listeners
254 Listeners
64 Listeners