Tune in Tomorrow

Blaze Collection

By: Melanie Benjamin

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

Length: 1 hr and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

An enterprising woman in a man’s world. A vision that changed daytime television. A galvanizing short story about ambition and sacrifice in the 1950s by New York Times bestselling author Melanie Benjamin.

From a triumph in radio serials to persevering in a burgeoning, male-dominated television industry, Abby Taylor has a million stories she’s dying to tell. The soap opera is her brainchild. Championed by her mother and sisters, nothing can stop Abby from becoming an aspirational voice for every woman in the country. Her life behind the scenes, however, is just as dramatic as any she could have invented. Stay tuned for an engrossing story of determination, grit, and love.

Melanie Benjamin’s Tune In Tomorrow is part of Blaze, a collection of short stories about incendiary women across the decades who dare to defy convention. They can be read or listened to in one sitting.

©2024 Melanie Benjamin LLC. (P)2024 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Fabulous and Fierce

What a brilliant short story! I did appreciate the origin story for Soap Operas. Abby is all sorts of awesome. Finally, a strong female main character in this series 😅
An Amazon Original, part of the Kindle Unlimited catalog.

You've Come A Long Way Baby...

...until 2016...

In just an hour of audiobook Melanie Benjamin sums up the conundrum of the career woman in post-war, pre-womens lib era. These are the "Author's Notes" - they should make you want to read or listen. Free with Amazon Prime.

Tune In Tomorrow is loosely inspired by the life of Irna Phillips. Phillips was known as “Queen of the Soaps” for her pioneering of the radio serial, geared toward women and sponsored by companies such as Procter & Gamble, in the 1930s. She was then instrumental in moving this format to daytime television in 1949. These Are My Children was the first soap opera to air on a major television network; she followed it with As the World Turns in 1956, which was the first soap opera to air for half an hour. Phillips was a single woman working in a male-dominated industry; she adopted two children but admitted later in life she wasn’t successful as a mother; she was too dedicated to her work.
She mentored Agnes Nixon, who went on to great success of her own in this field. Soap operas were the only shows on early television that depicted single women, women in troubled marriages, women whose lives didn’t always revolve around men. In the early days, those shows had predominantly female casts. It’s hard to realize, today, just how empowering the soap opera was for women—and just how much disdain most of the male television executives had for it. But Irna Phillips was always proud of her achievements and should be remembered for them.

Solid 4 stars

A woman dominating in ANYTHING in the 40's and 50's was really a big deal. The fact that Abby is able to do so without outwardly compromising her morals or femininity is a big deal.

distracting

voice acting was over the top & distracting, could not follow the storyline - I quit after 20 minutes.