A Sad Day

It must be a very sad day to be Agnes Nixon. The iconic daytime scribe who penned some of the most socially relevant stories in the history of the medium just saw her two remaining creations killed off at the same time.

I'm talking, of course, about One Life to Live and All My Children, which were both cancelled by ABC today. They will be replaced by a talk show revolving around cooking and a weight loss competition.

Though neither soap has LGBT characters onscreen at the moment, they were both leading soaps when it came to telling those stories over the years. All My Children broke real ground when they became the first soap to give us a gay character from a core family, Erica Kane's daughter Bianca, who came out of the closet back in 2000.

One Life to Live gave us the first teen gay character on daytime back in 1993 when future movie star Ryan Philippe played gay teen Billy Douglas. More recently, of course, that show gave us the amazing pairing of Kyle and Fish, which included the first real onscreen love scene between two men, including showing them in bed together afterward. In fact, that particular scene was better than anything I'd ever seen on primetime on any network. The two men also became parents, but were written off just when the show could have broken even more ground by giving us a story about the first gay dads raising a child on daytime.

Those were far from the only LGBT characters or socially relevant stories that these two shows told over the years, though they were certainly right up there with the best. All My Children was the show that gave us television's first legal abortion back in the 1970's and dealt with the very controversial issue of the Vietnam War in real time.

One Life to Live was the fist soap that had African American characters in major storylines in the late 1960's, including the controversial story of Carla Gray, a light skinned African American woman who passed herself off as Italian in order to get ahead in a racist society. A decade later they gave us the explosive Karen Wolek storyline, about a housewife with low self esteem who was secretly moonlighting as a prostitute. It made actress Judith Light a household name.

These were both greatly important shows not just to daytime TV but to television itself, mostly because of the driving force of Agnes Nixon, a woman who knew that you could tell great stories that were also meaningful and socially relevant. Sadly, her successors in the soap world largely forgot this lesson and all these cancellations we've been seeing in recent years is largely the result of that.

The simultaneous loss of these two particular soaps is in fact the worst blow that daytime TV has ever been dealt. If you had been able to fool yourself up to now that daytime soaps were not a dying breed, you certainly can't deny it any longer. There will soon be a grand total of four soaps remaining on the air.

All My Children will take its final bow in September and we'll have One Life to Live on our screens until January. With nine months remaining and nothing left to lose from those who blamed gay characters for driving down the ratings, can we hope to see a final return from Kish? It may not be likely, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

This is truly a sad day for any soap fan, even those like me who have become disenchanted by the direction the medium has taken writing wise. A lot of television history and a lot of talented actors are about to be thrown out for what sound to me like two very short lived TV shows that no one will even remember a decade from now.