Four-and-a-half decades after its April 2, 1956, debut, top-rated daytime soap opera As the World Turns keeps spinning along. Created by Irna Phillips, whose other soaps include The Guiding Light, Another World, Days of Our Lives and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, As the World Turns debuted on CBS the same day as The Edge of Night (which played on CBS through 1975 before moving to ABC for nine years), and the two were television's first thirty-minute-long soap operas, up from the fifteen minutes of previous soaps.

The show is set in the generic Midwestern burg of Oakdale, a veritable Peyton Place whose inhabitants are forever immersed in sin and scandal, conquest and confession, deceit and desire. Originally, the plot lines spotlighted two dissimilar yet inexorably intertwined families: the middle-income Hughes and the ambitious Lowell clans, each consisting of married couples and offspring. One of...