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Faraway Hill

television series

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 11, 2026
Entity authorityQ5434852 ↗
Source-derived summary

Faraway Hill is the first soap opera broadcast on an American television network, airing on the DuMont Television Network on Wednesday nights at 9:00 PM between October 2 and December 18, 1946. A Variety article stated the Caples advertising agency bought time on DuMont for "experimentation purposes," and had "walked where other video programmers feared to tread," moving soap operas from radio to the "infant medium television."

The series' plot was based on a novel that David P. Lewis had begun, but never finished.

Synopsis

Karen St. John, a wealthy widowed New York City socialite, decides to spend time with her relatives, the Willow family, who live near the small town of Faraway Hill, in Kansas. St. John is attracted to Charlie White who is engaged to her niece, Louise Willow.

The series had an "all-seeing voice" that allowed viewers to know what the characters were thinking. A musical interlude would fade out so the voice could be heard. An example is: "Turn back, turn back, Karen St. John!

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Faraway Hill” is television series. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Faraway, Hill and television, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1946—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Faraway, Hill and television is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “television series” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5434852. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1946.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Faraway Hill”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Faraway Hill primary sources, Faraway Hill archive and Faraway research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Faraway Hill”?
  2. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
  3. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Faraway Hill” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.