Bess McAllister Flynn (August 1886 - February 28, 1976) was an American actress and a writer of radio soap operas.
[1] Flynn acted in stock theater in Canada[2] and in the midwestern United States before she began working on radio.
[1] When a dispute about sponsorship caused Irna Phillips to stop writing Painted Dreams, Flynn became one of the show's new writers.
[3] Programs that she wrote included We Love and Learn, Life Begins (later retitled Martha Webster),[9] Bachelor's Children and We Are Four.
[1] Flynn said that criticism leveled at soap operas "could have been avoided if certain sponsors and agencies — not all of them by any means — had not underestimated the tastes of their listeners.
"[12] She said, "Some [soap operas], not many, have good writing and are first-class popular entertainment",[12] She added that many novels had literary quality while they appealed to the masses, noting that a similar situation could exist for serial dramas on radio.
[12] Flynn was part of "a vigorous new school of near-realists" in soap opera, a description that encompassed directors, writers, and producers who valued intimacy and sincerity more than thrills in the shows on which they worked.
[13] Flynn said that, as she had plots in mind "for the next two years or more", she considered the characters in her shows to be real and avoided getting them involved in devices such as court trials, kidnappings, and murders.