April 18, 2023: Soap Opera Studying: The First TV Soaps

[April 22nd will markthe 100th anniversary of the birth of the king of primetime soap operas,. So thisweek I’ll AmericanStudy Spelling and other soap opera contexts, leading up to acrowd-sourced cliffhanger of a weekend post! So share your soapy responses andthoughts, you evil twins you!]

OnAmericanStudies takeaways from the first three televised soap operas.

1)     FarawayHill: The first televised soap was broadcast live once a week on the groundbreakingDuMontTelevision Network, aiming on Wednesdays between 9 and 9:30pm from Octoberto December, 1946. An adaptation of an unfinished novel from creator and longtimeTV writer and director DavidP. Lewis, Faraway Hill told the storyof wealthy young widow Karen St. John () who moves toNew York to stay with relatives in the titular Kansas town and falls in lovewith her niece’s fiancé. While that plotline sounds like plenty of other soapopera stories, its show was quite strikingly experimental—as it aired live andfeatured no commercials, the show made no money for the network; Lewis’ goal,instead, was to “testthe mind of the viewer.” An interesting way to frame the entirety of thenew medium of television in that mid-1940s evolutionary moment.

2)     Highway to the Stars: Theexperiment seemed to be a success, as less than a year later DuMont’s flagshipTV station, NewYork City’s WABD, aired another live, weekly nighttime soap opera, thistime featuring commercials. That show was Highwayto the Stars, which ran from August to October 1947 and starred Patricia Jones as a talentedyoung singer trying to make it in the big city. As with Faraway Hill, Highway’slive broadcasts means that unfortunately no extant copies of episodes remain,so we can’t for example compare the two to see how the genre was evolving inthese early years. But I do think it’s interesting to note how early this newTV genre tapped into one of the most iconic American stories, that perennial, SisterCarrie-like tale of a young womantraveling from her rural hometown to navigate the allure and challenges of thecity. If Faraway dealt with thefamily melodrama that has so often defined soaps, Highway made clear that this new genre would likewise connect tomore universal stories.

3)     TheseAre My Children: There’s no doubt that both Faraway and Highway have a strong claim to the title of “first TV soap opera”;but since they aired once a week and at night, it’s understandable that thedaily daytime soap These Are My Children isoften granted that title. The show aired live and for only 15 minutes, from5-5:15 every weekday on Chicago’s WNBQ from January to March, 1949, so it certainlywasn’t yet the prerecorded, hour-long daily formula that came to define thedaily soap opera genre. But These wascreated by IrnaPhillips, as I wrote yesterday already well-established by this time as apioneering figure in the soap opera genre, and was indeed closely based onprior radio soaps of hers like PaintedDreams. So it’s fair to say that Thesewas the first full attempt to translate the genre from radio to television, anddespite its short run (and runtime) thus represents an important watershedmoment.

Nextsoap-post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other soap opera contexts or stories you’d share?