By Bob Walsh
On this day (more or less) in
1946 the first TV "soap opera" was broadcast, on Wednesday evenings.
The DuMont TV Network broadcast Faraway Hill, based on an incomplete
novel. The central character, Karen St. John, was a wealthy new widow
who moved to the town of Faraway Hill in upstate New York to be near to
her family. She then became infatuated with a young man who was
adopted by her family and was engaged to be married to her niece. The
young widow died at the end of the show, which ran from early October to
mid-December 1946.
There are no copies, no scripts, no PR materials, NOTHING available on this show making it a very, very lost bit of TV history.
Interestingly
enough the show had no sponsor. An advertising company bought the slot
and ran the program as a proof of concept, to see how soap operas would
translate from the established medium of radio to the new medium of
television.
It was shot live on a budget of $300 per episode. The first episode was shot in the basement of Wannamaker's department store.
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