Agnes Nixon

Agnes Nixon (née Eckhardt; December 10, 1922 – September 28, 2016) was an American television writer and producer, and the creator of the ABC soap operas One Life to Live, All My Children, as well as Loving and its spin-off The City.

Nixon's work as producer and writer expanded storylines for American daytime television – the first health-related storyline, the first storyline related to the Vietnam War, as well as both the first televised lesbian kiss and abortion. She won five Writers' Guild of America Awards, five Daytime Emmy Awards, and in 2010, received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Nixon was often referred to as the "Queen of The Modern American Soap Opera".

Nixon was born Agnes Eckhardt on December 10, 1922, in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Agnes Patricia (née Dalton) and Harry Joseph Eckhardt. She attended Northwestern University, where she was a member of Alpha Chi Omega sorority. She began her career in soaps working for Irna Phillips. Under her tutelage, Nixon was a writer on Woman in White and As the World Turns, and was head writer for Search for Tomorrow, Guiding Light, and Another World.

During her time on Guiding Light, Nixon is believed to have written the first health-related storyline on a daytime soap opera. A friend of Nixon's had died from cervical cancer, and Nixon wanted to do something to educate women about getting a pap smear. She wrote it into Guiding Light by having the lead character, Bert Bauer, experience a cancer scare. The storyline aired in 1962. In 2002, she was the inaugural recipient of the Pioneer for Health Award from Sentinel for Health for her work on the episode.

By the mid-1960s, Nixon had created a blueprint for what would become All My Children. CBS executives passed on the program, due to contractual issues with sponsor Lever Brothers, who sponsored a program that All My Children would replace in its time slot. Later ABC asked her to create a show that would reflect a more "contemporary" tone; that creation was One Life to Live. Nixon, "tired of the restraints imposed by the WASPy, non-controversial nature of daytime drama", presented the network with a startlingly original premise and cast of characters. Although the show was built along the classic soap formula of a rich family (the Lords) and a poor family (the Woleks), One Life to Live emphasized the ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of the people of Llanview, Pennsylvania, a fictional Main Line suburb of Philadelphia."

Premiering in 1968, One Life to Live reflected changing social structures and attitudes. The first few years of the show were rich in issue stories and characters including a Jewish character (Dave Siegel), an Irish American family (the Rileys), and some of the first African American leading roles in soap operas with Sadie Gray (Lillian Hayman), Carla Gray (Ellen Holly) and Ed Hall (Al Freeman Jr.). Carla's story, for example, had her develop from a character who was passing as white to one who embodied black pride, with white and black lovers along the way, to antagonize racists. One Life to Live has been called "the most peculiarly American of soap operas: the first serial to present a vast array of ethnic types, broad comic situations, a constant emphasis on social issues, and strong male characters."

With the success of One Life to Live, Nixon was given the greenlight for All My Children, which began as a half-hour soap opera in 1970. The show was successful from its beginning, combining its study of social clashes with acting talent including Ruth Warrick (Phoebe Tyler) and Rosemary Prinz (Amy Tyler). Nixon helmed the writing team for over a decade, until 1983, and again introduced many social issues into storylines, including the Vietnam War, the anti-war movement, homosexuality, the AIDS epidemic, and American television's first onscreen abortion.

All My Children was a half-hour show for the first seven years of its run, and virtually no recordings of those episodes survive; ABC erased the videotapes of those early episodes for their reuse. When ABC went to Nixon and said that they wanted her to expand the show to an hour in 1975, she resisted due to her own creative/quality concerns but later agreed under the condition that the tapes of the show would be archived and preserved by the network. Episodes began to be saved in 1976, and All My Children expanded to an hour on April 25, 1977.