John Brownlee

The Matron Saint of Soap Operas

The Mental Floss blogs has a wonderfully entertaining look at Irna Phillips, the woman who single-handedly created the entire genre of the soap opera, including all of its clichés, including the use of melodramatic organ and the frequent use of disease-related plots, which were informed by her own hypochondria. Of course, it wasn’t all success: […]

Dynasty

The Mental Floss blogs has a wonderfully entertaining look at Irna Phillips, the woman who single-handedly created the entire genre of the soap opera, including all of its clichés, including the use of melodramatic organ and the frequent use of disease-related plots, which were informed by her own hypochondria.

Of course, it wasn't all success:

Despite her success, Phillips wasn’t completely at home in the television genre. When NBC attempted to run the first color TV broadcast of “The Guiding Light” in 1953, Phillips deliberately set the entire episode in a surgical ward, where nearly everything—from props, to costumes, to the walls—was either black or white. The episode was a flop and Phillips ended up single-handedly pushing back the adoption of regular color broadcasting by almost a decade.

Even when not rendered in monochrome, surgery wards are technicolor wonderlands of green tile, vivid gore and squirting marrow.

Mental Floss [How To: Build a "Dynasty" [Mental Floss]