Agnes Nixon

willing to tackle certain social issues, let's say, in their storytelling far before primetime or mainstream cinema and whatnot, right? There's something to say in this book about the way they handled the HIV AIDS epidemic.

And, you know, it is certainly true that there are showrunners like Agnes Nixon, for example, who were you know, writing stories about abortion and women's reproductive health long before so many of her peers in the primetime space were, right? But by that same token, you know, Charlotte is totally correct in that, you know, if you kind of look at the sort of abiding political backdrop in which a lot of these stories emerged, you kind of see these different patterns shift.

And so she certainly reshaped my thinking about abortion you know, how progressive soaps are or are not.

But I definitely do agree with you that in today's day and age, they have grown a bit more timid.

Thank you.

Yeah, you know, there's an entire essay about Erna Phillips in this book for listeners who are curious.

But she mentored both Bill Bell and Agnes Nixon and Bill Bell, of course, went on to create Y&R and B&B.

And like you said, Brandon, what I found is that, you know, he really was enamored of this sort of old Hollywood aesthetic, right? Just the cinematography, the costumes, right? There's something kind of Serbian about the way those shows look versus Agnes Nixon, you know, not to say that she was disinterested in that, but so many of her great storylines on shows like All My Children and One Life to Live were fixated on social issues not in a sort of eat your vegetables kind of way but i think really in you know a touching human way that would reach any viewer regardless of where they sat on the political spectrum and i think that you see a lot of the roots of their storytelling in erno phillips so it's cool to kind of think about the family tree so to speak across different networks

Phillips was astonishingly prolific, working on as many as six serials at once, and from her Chicago apartment, dictating two million to three million words a year to her trusted secretary, Rose Cooperman.

She also trained a generation of daytime auteurs, including Agnes Nixon, All My Children, and William J.

Bell, The Young and the Restless.

While some of Phillips' characters lived in a world she only dreamed of, many storylines were inspired by her real life, which was marked by hardship.

the progressive, uh, you know, said, "I, you know, I'm gonna speak truth to power." AIPAC came in, once again, wasted millions of dollars trying to shut her down, and she won.

And we have, uh, uh, Agnes Nixon in, in, in Florida.

Uh, and a v- progressive in a red state of Florida, and she won.

And you know, the last time you and I talked, it was just after the, um, Abdul El-Sayed victory in the Michigan Democratic primaries, and everybody was saying, "Hey, he's unelectable.

I mean, it's 'cause the election results were a little hopeful.

There was a, there was another one this week with... little hopeful, uh, in Florida, with the performance of, uh, Agnes Nixon.

Uh, uh, uh, you know, this freaked out, of course, everybody in the Democratic establishment who were like, "Oh, no.

Now we've elected somebody who thinks everyone should have healthcare.