"All My Children" Celebrates 40 Years in Pine Valley

All My Children debuted on January 5, 1970. Created by legendary Agnes Nixon (her other soaps include One Life to Live and Loving), AMC helped contemporize the daytime serial by incorporating social themes into the storylines, covering race, sex, and medical issues. The Vietnam War was featured in early storylines, and according to The Museum of Television & Radio's Worlds Without End: The Art and History of the Soap Opera, character Erica Kane had television's first legal abortion in 1973.

In her Archive of American Television interview, Agnes Nixon told a story regarding the longevity of the series:

"Once we were plotting an episode and I looked down and saw that it was the six thousandth episode of All My Children, and so I said to the group, hey let’s knock off and go to lunch, I’ll take you to lunch. And when we came back, for the first time in my life, I had forgotten that I was supposed to have a telephone interview. So I called the reporter, who happened to be a woman in the Midwest, and apologized profusely and explained that we had discovered that it was our six thousandth episode we were writing-- and she did some figuring and said, do you realize, that if you had been writing nighttime that you would have been working 240 years? So it did sort of put that in perspective."

On November 12, 2008, All My Children celebrated its 10,000th show with a special appearance by Nixon.

A solid ratings-winner, All My Children intially had less success with the Daytime Emmy Awards. First in the running for the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series in the mid-70s, it took until the 1991-92 season before it won the top honor (another notorious example of AMC's Daytime Emmy battles, actress Susan Lucci-- the show's "Erica Kane" since it's inception-- was first nominated in 1978, and finally won in 1999).

In addition to Agnes Nixon, the Archive has interviewed several of the stars of All My Children, including: David Canary, Ruth Warrick, and Ellen Wheeler.