Elegy for the End of the “World”

“Good morning, dear.”

Those were the first words spoken by actress Helen Wagner, who portrayed matriarch Nancy Hughes until her death earlier this summer, on the afternoon of April 2, 1956 as CBS-TV premiered the first 30-minute daytime drama live from New York City – AS THE WORLD TURNS.

A production of Cincinnati soap and cleaning products giant Procter and Gamble – the company that gave this genre its nickname – ATWT was a creation of Irna Phillips, who had written and created the most successful soap operas of the radio era, such as THE GUIDING LIGHT.

The residents of fictional Oakdale, Illinois, were live on November 22, 1963, when Walter Cronkite broke into a scene between Nancy and Grandpa Hughes to announce that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.  And until the late 1970s, ATWT was still performing each episode live.  It ends its life next week, with the final episode taped at Brooklyn’s JC Studios.

ATWT was the number-one soap opera on television its first two decades, and was the first soap featured on TV GUIDE’s cover in 1971; original daytime vixen, Lisa, portrayed by Eileen Fulton, starred in her own prime-time spinoff series, OUR PRIVATE WORLD, in 1965; comedienne Carol Burnett even parodied the program on her variety show with “As the Stomach Turns”. The tragedies and triumphs of the Hughes and Stewart families carried the first quarter-century of ATWT, and if CBS wanted to be known as Tiffany network, then AS THE WORLD TURNS was among its crown jewels.

The few crazy years of competition with rival ABC’s youth-oriented “run-and-gun” soaps are not the most notable in show history, although these years did produce memorable storylines that featured future megastars like Meg Ryan, Marisa Tomei, and Julianne Moore.

For many viewers, however, the program’s golden age began in 1985 with the appointment of actor-turned-writer Douglas Marland to the post of Head Writer. Marland re-established the supremacy of the Hughes and Stewart families while adding the Snyder family as a representation of his own life growing up on a Midwestern farm.  He refused to let plot devices drive storylines; rather, with actor and audience input, allowed stories to develop from character.

Saying goodbye to an extended Oakdale family that I’ve been watching for virtually my entire life is proving difficult in these last days.  I have been there for all the kidnappings, evil twins, back-from-the-dead spouses, and baby switches all these years.  I also learned a lot about Alzheimer’s disease, rape, HIV/AIDS, discrimination, and alcoholism along the way.  ATWT was an escape, but it was also an education.

I have also witnessed some powerhouse acting – Larry Bryggman as John Dixon, Elizabeth Hubbard as Lucinda Walsh, Don Hastings as Bob Hughes, Colleen Zenk as Barbara Ryan, Maura West as Carly Tenney, Kathryn Hays as Kim Hughes, Michael Park as Jack Snyder, and many, many more who made my daily trip to Oakdale such a worthwhile visit.

I could boycott Bounty, stop doing dishes with Dawn, or never pop a Pringles can again, but how will holding a grudge against P&G products bring back my beloved show?  It can’t, and it won’t.

As the last day draws ever closer, it marks not only the demise of my soap opera habit but of the true soap opera era.  Procter & Gamble, the inventor of the soap opera, is giving them up permanently.  Love and family in the heart of America, as one reviewer called ATWT, is passing us by.

Irna Phillips should be recognized as a legend for her creation, a uniquely American institution that defined the genre and provided 13,858 episodes of quality drama to an audience of millions.  We will never see these episodes on DVD sets; books will not be written about these characters.  What has happened these past 54 years in Oakdale will fade into the mists of television memory.

Perhaps Irna Phillips had it right when she wrote the epigram for the series in 1956: “as the world turns, we know the bleakness of winter, the promise of spring, the fullness of summer and the harvest of autumn – the cycle of life is complete. What is true of the world, nature, is also true of man – he too has his cycle.”

Michael Bird is a band director for Tallassee City Schools in Tallassee, Alabama.  The final episode of “As the World Turns” aired this past Friday, September 17th at 1:00 p.m.

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