On October 2, 1946, American television made room for love, secrets, and family conflict. The DuMont network began airing „Far Hill“ - a series that is usually considered the first soap opera to air on an American television network. It was not the first television drama series at all, as similar programs were already broadcast locally, but it was the first series of this genre to reach a network audience in the United States.
The story is simple, but familiar today: widowed New Yorker Karen St. John leaves city life and goes to live with relatives in a small town. There she becomes close to Charlie White - a man who is already engaged to Louise Willow. Thus, a love triangle is formed from the very beginning, to which are added the clash between the city and the country lifestyle, family tensions and the inevitable moral dilemmas.
Television drama from the basement of a store
The creator, writer and director of the series is David P. Lewis. He develops the story from his unfinished novel. The first episode was broadcast live from an improvised studio in the basement of the Wanamaker’s department store in Greenwich Village, New York. This was a time when television production did not yet have established rules, and most programs were created directly in front of the cameras.
„Far Hill“ is a half-hour production and airs every Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. Between scenes, short pre-recorded segments, stills, and a voice-over that conveyed Karen's thoughts were used. At the end of each episode, viewers were promised that the story would continue next week - a technique that would later become a trademark of soap operas.
“DuMont was desperate for a program of some kind,“ Lewis said years later, as quoted by the “Los Angeles Times“.A commercial-free, no-recording experiment
The production was cheap even by early television standards. According to a report in “Billboard“, the budget was about $300 per episode. The series was advertiser-free and non-profit, and Lewis himself defined it as an experiment through which he wanted to test how viewers would react to a television version of the radio soap opera.
The series ended on December 18, 1946, after 12 weekly episodes. Today, “Far Hill“ also has a special status in television history: the series was broadcast live, before the spread of technology for regularly recording television programs, and no preserved episodes are known. What remain are the descriptions in the press, the names of the actors and the memory of the production that brought the radio soap opera to the new home of the drama - the television screen.
Sources: Los Angeles Times, Billboard, Variety