Faraway Hill
television series

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!
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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.