Often termed the “queen” of contemporary U.S. soap opera, Agnes Nixon is best known, and most honored, for introducing social issues into the soaps. Like William Bell (creator of The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful), Nixon apprenticed in radio with Irna Phillips, the creator of the first TV soap operas (adapting the genre from radio), for whom Nixon wrote dialogue for Woman in White. In the early 1960s, in her first job as a head writer (on Guiding Light), Nixon had the heroine, Bert Bauer (played by Charita Bauer), develop uterine cancer. Typical of this storyteller, Nixon was personally motivated to write this plotline: a friend had died of cancer and Nixon hoped to encourage women to have regular Pap smears.

However, the presentation of social and political issues in television soap opera really began in 1968, with the first show Nixon created, One Life to Live (OLTL). Nixon developed this soap for ABC, and it reflected the changing social structures and attitudes in the United States of its era. In its early years, OLTL was rich in issue stories and characters. It featured leads who were Jewish, as well as up-from-poverty Irish-American and Polish-American characters. In addition, OLTL was the first soap to portray African Americans as lead characters (Carla Gray, played by Ellen Holly, and Ed Hall, played by Al Freeman, Jr.). The character of Carla developed from a woman who was “passing as white” to one who embodied black pride, and she had romantic relationships with both black and white men. Ironically, when Holly and Freeman brought Carla and Ed back to One Life in the mid 1980s, they seemed out of place in the by-then WASP-ish setting of Llanview, Pennsylvania. “Color” in this era was created not by race, but by style, in the persons of the nouveau riche, Dallas-style oil family, the Buchanans. By the mid 1990s, however, interracial and Hispanic families had become central characters on the program.

Nixon created One Life to Live for ABC in order to get the opportunity to write her “dream” story, All My Children (AMC). Launched in 1970, AMC placed more emphasis on personal angles than OLTL, but the newer soap did tackle social issues such as child abuse and the Vietnam War. In May 1971, AMC depicted a character going through the process of abortion—the first this had been done following the legalization of abortion. Assuming the audience would be shocked, AMC’s writers gave the character Erica Kane (Susan Lucci) a “bad” motive for seeking the procedure (she wanted a modeling job), and, following the abortion, Erica was afflicted with septicemia (this plot twist being promoted as serving educational ends as well as “poetic justice”).

Nixon wrote political nonconformity into scripts, a very rare trait in prime-time television but rarer still in daytime drama. When All My Children debuted in 1970, it featured Amy Tyler (Rosemary Prinz) as a peace activist. Nixon then had the young hero Phillip Brent drafted against his will; he was later missing in action in Vietnam. Political pages in U.S. newspapers took note of a speech against the war by the AMC character of Ruth Martin (Mary Fickett), who had raised Phillip as her son. Fickett won the first Emmy given to a daytime performer for her work during the 1972–73 season. In 1974 Nixon turned to humanizing the Vietnamese, showing Phillip, in one of the few war scenes on TV soap opera, being rescued by a young Vietnamese, played by a man who had been adopted by one of Nixon’s friends.

In the mid-1970s, All My Children’s focus on young adult characters included not only romance and sexuality, but also the characters’ growing pains. From its earliest days, the soap has revolved around Erica Kane. Initially presented as a willful but winningly vulnerable teenager, Erica has matured over the years, becoming a strong-minded but winningly vulnerable career woman and parent, the always triumphant survivor of rape, the loss of a parent, disastrous love affairs, failed marriages, drug addiction, and innumerable other tragedies.

In the early 1980s, AMC’s popularity soared as young people raced home (or to their dormitory lounges) at lunch time to watch the classic star-crossed romance of Jenny Gardner (Kim Delaney) and Greg Nelson (Lawrence Lau). The divisive issue was class: Jenny was from a troubled, lower-class family; Greg’s mother, Enid Nelson, was Pine Valley’s stereotypical snob. Equally popular were Angie Morgan (Debbi Morgan) and Jesse Hubbard (Darnell Williams), soap opera’s first African-American “super couple.”

The character of Tad Martin (Michael Knight) epitomized another Agnes Nixon gift to soap opera: humor. Tad’s biological parents were an evil father, Ray Gardner (dead since the 1980s), and a loving but ditzy mother, Opal (one of Nixon’s most famous comic creations). After Ray abandoned him in a park, Tad was raised by Joe Martin (Ray McConnell) and his wife Ruth. Joe and Ruth were the central father and mother of AMC, and in folk-myth terms, they were the good parents, as steadfast as Tad’s blood parents were unreliable and frightening.

Nixon’s other archetypal creations on AMC include “tent-pole” characters, usually older women such as Erica’s mother, Mona Tyler (Frances Heflin), and Myrtle Fargate (Eileen Heckart). Tent-pole characters, says Nixon, are “the Greek chorus, in a sense...telling the audience how to feel.”

In addition to folk myth, Nixon also drew on the religious and mystical. One of her favorite tales is from the third soap opera she created (with the late Douglas Marland), Loving (ABC, 1983; renamed The City in 1995). Archetypal good/bad twins Keith and Jonathan (both played by John Hurley) battled, and the evil Jonathan, after falling from Golden Gate Bridge, returned with supernatural powers. Nixon claimed Jonathan made a pact with the devil, citing Faust and C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters as sources.

After semi-retiring from writing in 1997, Nixon returned to the job of head writer for All My Children in 1999, a position she had last held in 1992. Once back at the helm, she launched one more controversial, socially relevant, and precedent-setting storyline, in which the teenage daughter of Erica Kane came out as a lesbian. In 2000 Nixon announced her retirement from writing soap operas. Her involvement with ABC soaps did not end completely, however, as she took a new position as story consultant for all daytime dramas on the network.