Agnes Nixon is the most influential writer in daytime television, introducing social issues and moral seriousness to the soap opera. She served an apprenticeship with the creator of the genre, Irna Phillips, developing dialogue for the radio serial...

Agnes Nixon (born Agnes Eckhardt on December 27 1927 in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) is an American writer and producer. She attended Northwestern University where she was a member of Alpha Chi Omega sorority. She is best known as the creator of soap operas...

For the last decade acclaimed Upper West Side horror novelist Peter Straub has followed the ABC soap opera One Life to Live with such dogged enthusiasm that earlier this year the producers awarded him a walk-on role. “I played retired detective Pete Braust,” Mr. Straub...

Time after tedious time, when critics suffer an aridity of fresh, inventive phrases with which to denigrate a film, play or book, they fall back on "soap opera"; it has become the classic cliché of derogation…. [The] syndrome persists that soap opera is a Never-Never Land where hack writers and inferior producers, directors and actors serve melodramatic pap to a lunatic fringe of female children who grow older but never grow up….

For those of us who watch the soap operas, once the citadel of escapism, it is clear that we are living in an age in which even such places as Oakdale, Pine Valley, Henderson, Bay City and Somerset—all soap opera locales—can no longer remain completely aloof from the forces at work in our society…. But the question is: Just how far have we come? Unfortunately, a closer look at the situation reveals that, despite some creeping social relevance, the soaps have yet to come to grips with re...

Partly because of her concern for three-dimensional characters, Agnes Nixon's shows are among the most popular on daytime TV. (p. 13) More than anyone else, Agnes Nixon has let reality into the claustrophobic sound studios of soap operas. Not too much reality, of course. Certain subjects, such as homosexuality, never come up in soap-opera conversation. Family anguish and romantic misalliances still dominate the plots. Yet, over the past couple of years, viewers have been exposed to information on VD,...