''Highway to the Stars'' was an early American
live television
Live television is a television production broadcast in real-time, as events happen, in the present. In a secondary meaning, it may refer to streaming television over the Internet when content or programming is played continuously (not on demand) ...
soap opera, which was broadcast on
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
station
WABD
WABD (97.5 FM) is an American radio station licensed to serve the community of Mobile, Alabama. The station, established in 1973 as WABB-FM, is owned and operated by Cumulus Media. Its studios are on Dauphin Street in Midtown Mobile, and its ...
, flagship station of the
DuMont Television Network
The DuMont Television Network (also known as the DuMont Network, DuMont Television, simply DuMont/Du Mont, or (incorrectly) Dumont ) was one of America's pioneer commercial television networks, rivaling NBC and CBS for the distinction of being ...
, from August to October 1947, at which point it was replaced with ''
Look Upon a Star'', itself eventually replaced with ''
Camera Headlines
''Camera Headlines'' was an early American television series that aired from January 1948 to 1949 on the DuMont Television Network.
Broadcast history
DuMont's previous national news program, '' The Walter Compton News'', had premiered on DuMont st ...
'' in January 1948.
Patricia Jones played the lead role, and also starred in the NBC series ''
Martin Kane, Private Eye
''Martin Kane, Private Eye'' is an American crime drama radio and television series sponsored by United States Tobacco Company. It aired via radio from 1949 to 1952 and was simultaneously a television series on NBC from 1949 to 1954. It was the " ...
'' (1951). ''Highway to the Stars'' aired on Tuesdays at 7:30pm ET, not Thursdays as stated in ''Billboard''. Like many other local series on WABD, it may have been considered eligible to be picked up as a network series.
Premise
The premise was described by ''
Billboard
A billboard (also called a hoarding in the UK and many other parts of the world) is a large outdoor advertising structure (a billing board), typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertise ...
'' as "the travails of a corn-bred gal warbler
inger
Inger may refer to:
People
* Inger (given name), a list of people
* Inger, the main character of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale ''The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf''
* Robert F. Inger (1920–2019), American herpetologist
* Stella Inger, America ...
trying to make good in the big town".
Episode status
As with most DuMont series, no episodes are known to exist. Methods to record live television, such as
kinescope
Kinescope , shortened to kine , also known as telerecording in Britain, is a recording of a television program on motion picture film, directly through a lens focused on the screen of a video monitor. The process was pioneered during the 194 ...
s were only just becoming available by the time the series ended. The network probably thought there was no need to record the series in the first place, given that it aired on a single station only, though a couple kinescopes do remain of WABD's local programming of the following year (1948).
See also
*
List of programs broadcast by the DuMont Television Network
This is a list of programs broadcast by the DuMont Television Network, which operated in the United States from 1942 to 1956. All regularly scheduled programs which were aired on the DuMont network are listed below, regardless of whether they orig ...
*
List of surviving DuMont Television Network broadcasts
The DuMont Television Network was launched in 1946 and ceased broadcasting in 1956. Allen DuMont, who created the network, preserved most of what it produced in kinescope format. By 1958, however, much of the library had been destroyed to recove ...
*
1947-48 United States network television schedule
*''
Faraway Hill
''Faraway Hill'' was 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 advertis ...
'' (1946) another early DuMont soap opera
Bibliography
*David Weinstein, ''The Forgotten Network: DuMont and the Birth of American Television'' (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press
Temple University Press is a university press founded in 1969 that is part of Temple University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). It is one of thirteen publishers to participate in the Knowledge Unlatched pilot, a global library consortium approach t ...
, 2004)
*Alex McNeil, ''Total Television'', Fourth edition (New York:
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a British publishing, publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.[Ballantine Books
Ballantine Books is a major book publisher located in the United States, founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine with his wife, Betty Ballantine. It was acquired by Random House in 1973, which in turn was acquired by Bertelsmann in 1998 and remains ...]
, 1964)
References
External links
''Highway to the Stars'' at IMDB
{{US daytime soaps
1947 American television series debuts
1947 American television series endings
DuMont Television Network original programming
American television soap operas
Black-and-white American television shows
English-language television shows
Lost television shows