The following guest post from media historian Taylor Cole Miller is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
DuMont Television Network. “Network ID.” 1954. https://archive.org/details/DuMont_Network
The nesting material of my university office is blank VHS tapes. A few of these tapes were well-worn security blankets with comforting shows I watched over and over to propel myself through childhood and adolescence. Where normal people might have held onto a cherished dolly or baseball glove as nostalgic trinkets of their youth, I kept my jumpy copy of CBS’ live-action Alice in Wonderland along with episodes of The Golden Girls, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and Xena: Warrior Princess. These artifacts, the ones I clung to growing up, eventually became the foundation of my research as a media historian. While writing my master’s thesis, a media ethnography of rural gay men, you’d find me at garage and estate sales every month asking if there were any old VHS tapes of Oprah lying around. And in order to even access episodes of his short-lived show, All That Glitters, for my doctoral dissertation, I had to become friendly with and visit producer Norman Lear himself to watch shows in his personal archive. Television culture is inextricably linked with American culture, but most early television is lost forever, a vanishing era of our culture with few traces.
As a scholar, my specific area of interest is television syndication—the practice of selling content directly to local stations and station ownership groups without going through a network. The stations can air these shows at whatever time and with whatever frequency they desire. There are two primary types of syndication: First-run syndication such as talk shows like The Oprah Winfrey Show or Ricki Lake; game shows like Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune; court shows like Judge Judy or scripted originals like Xena: Warrior Princess or Star Trek: The Next Generation. And second-run syndication, most often referred to as reruns of popular shows. This means my objects of study are often limited by what is available and how. Many television shows from the last 50 or 60 years have been officially released on physical media like VHS, Betamax, LaserDisc, or DVD, or made available via streaming or on-demand services, but these are primarily primetime network or cable programs, not daily syndicated talk shows, game shows, public affairs programs, or kids’ TV. Despite its own ephemerality, syndication remains television’s best archivist: It preserves shows that can still turn a profit in reruns, even if it doesn’t always ensure their accessibility or proper care. While syndication keeps certain programs alive in archives, they often remain unaired or improperly preserved without enough demand. Those that no longer generate revenue, no matter how innovative, tend to disappear—left to decay on shelves or locked away in obsolete formats under the weight of copyright restrictions–or worse. One of the most tragic examples of this vanishing culture, allegedly twenty feet below the surface of the Upper New York Bay, is the lost archive of the DuMont Television Network.
Cavalcade of Stars. “The Honeymooners.” 1951. https://archive.org/details/Cavalcade_Of_Stars/.
In television’s beginning, three familiar companies expanded their operations from radio: NBC, CBS, and ABC. But there was also a fourth company competing with these fledgling television efforts—DuMont, a television and equipment manufacturer that contributed numerous innovations in the technology of TV itself. Although big commercial television was still years away, DuMont was selling television sets by the 1930s. Its 1938 set, for example, the DuMont 180, featured a massive 14-inch screen and retailed for $395-445. To help sell his sets, Allen B. DuMont opened an experimental television station (W2XVT), which operated programming that the showroom models could display to demonstrate picture quality, a practice that continued with the launch of the commercial DuMont Network in 1946.
That year, DuMont gave the greenlight to the half-hour show, Faraway Hill. Although “firsts” are hard to claim given that much of early TV history is lost, Faraway Hill is often thought to be the first network television soap opera. The show was created by David P. Lewis, who adapted it from his unfinished novel. According to Elana Levine in her history of soaps, Her Stories, like with radio soaps before, the show included “stream-of-consciousness” style voice-overs that allowed women to look away as needed under the social expectations of household duties. As reported in his obituary, Lewis said DuMont was desperate for programming, particularly during the nine hours of weekly programming it aired in competition with NBC. The show aired only ten episodes, and reportedly made no money, with Lewis claiming he did it to “test the mind of the viewer.” Through Faraway Hill, Levine argues that DuMont “experimented with visuals, including set changes, establishing shots, and some visual effects while, narratively, it tried a recapping strategy that would become a fixture of daytime TV soaps, repeating the last scene of the previous episode as the start of the next.” A second soap effort, A Woman to Remember, ran daily for five months in 1949, with half of that run appearing in daytime. Although Faraway Hill is recognized as the first primetime television serial—a format that would define all Primetime Emmy winners for Outstanding Drama Series in the 21st century—it has vanished because DuMont broadcast it live and, as far as we know, never recorded it.
Faraway Hill wasn’t the only first in its genre from DuMont. The network also aired Captain Video and His Video Rangers from 1949 to 1955, considered the first popular sci-fi television show and DuMont’s longest-running program. If you’re a fan of television comedy, you can thank Mary Kay and Johnny, often thought to be the first network sitcom—a multi-camera comedy that premiered on DuMont in 1947. DuMont was also the first network to broadcast the NFL championship game in 1951, launched Jackie Gleason’s career, and aired the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954.”
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While television was predominantly white at the time, DuMont produced pioneering shows led by women of color. In 1950, the phenomenally talented Hazel Scott likely became the first Black woman to host her own television show, decades before Oprah Winfrey’s debut in national syndication. The Hazel Scott Show, which aired thrice weekly on DuMont, showcased Scott—a piano prodigy and accomplished musician who had won an early Civil Rights case–a racial discrimination lawsuit against restaurateurs Harry and Blanche Utz in February 1949. However, after she was blacklisted in Red Channels (a publication that accused entertainers of communist sympathies during the McCarthy era), a smear campaign led to the show’s cancellation, and Scott’s groundbreaking contributions to early television history have largely been forgotten.
Also lost to history is DuMont’s The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong in 1951, featuring legendary actor Anna May Wong in probably the first American television series with an Asian-American lead. Wong’s character was an art dealer whose investigative art history skills also helped her become a crime solver. There are no known recordings or even scripts of the show still in existence. The only information we have on these programs is what remains of it in schedules and TV listings. For this article, I audited several TV History textbooks from respected scholars, and I could find no mention of either The Hazel Scott Show or The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong.
DuMont Television collapsed in 1955 after clunky UHF (Ultra High Frequency) regulations hammered the final nail in its coffin. These rules limited the reach of UHF stations, putting DuMont at a disadvantage compared to the more accessible VHF (Very High Frequency) channels. Still, before its demise, DuMont produced a rich schedule of innovative programs—many of which may never be seen again. According to testimony in a report for the Library of Congress, DuMont’s television archive was intentionally destroyed as a result of the negotiations of a sale in the 1970s. Reportedly, the parties were concerned about who would be responsible for the sensitive archival needs, like temperature control, of such a massive collection. In the report, Edie Adams, a talented performer and a key figure at DuMont, along with her husband Ernie Kovacs—who hosted his own show on the network—shared what she heard about its demise while trying to archive her husband’s career. “At 2 a.m., [one of the lawyers] had three huge semis back up to the loading dock […] filled them all with stored kinescopes and 2” videotapes, drove them to a waiting barge in New Jersey, took them out on the water, made a right at the Statue of Liberty, and dumped them in the Upper New York Bay. Very neat. No problem.” While this is the commonly reported lore of DuMont’s demise, no one really knows for sure what happened. Could some materials still exist? True or not, DuMont’s metaphorical watery grave nevertheless serves as a poignant reminder for how easily traces of our past can vanish.
The Internet Archive is an important repository where saved DuMont programs have been collected and made available to the public. Many of these programs survive from personal collections of performers or producers who kept copies in their personal files. The Internet Archive houses a few surviving examples of DuMont programming, including clips from Cavalcade of Stars, where The Honeymooners and Jackie Gleason made their first appearances in sketches. The archive also includes Okay, Mother, a game show that premiered in 1948, and one of the earliest daytime network TV shows, with one surviving episode available to watch.
Okay, Mother. 1950. https://archive.org/details/Okay_Mother/.
Also in the Internet Archive are one or a few episodes each of DuMont shows now in the public domain, including The Adventures of Ellery Queen, The Arthur Murray Show, Flash Gordon, Front Page Detective, The Goldbergs, Hold That Camera, The Johns Hopkins Science Review, Kids and Company, Life is Worth Living, Man Against Crime, Miss U.S. Television Grand Finals, The Morey Amsterdam Show, The Old American Barn Dance, On Your Way, Public Prosecutor, Rocky King- Inside Detective, The School House, Sense and Nonsense, Steve Randall, They Stand Accused, Tom Corbett- Space Cadet, Twenty Questions, and You Asked for It.
Beneath the surface of the Upper New York Bay might rest DuMont’s legacy, forgotten by most but not entirely lost. But while its kinescopes may have submitted to a watery grave, the efforts of open-access archives like the Internet Archive—storing the personal collections of those who saw value in preserving their histories—offer glimmers of hope. Perhaps, like my cherished collection of VHS tapes, some forgotten episode, script, or production material is still out there, waiting to be discovered, languishing in an old filing cabinet, on a neglected shelf, or in a dusty attic. Or maybe we’ll unearth some other unknown broadcast treasure in the search. With the ongoing work of archivists, collectors, and historians, maybe we can work to piece together the remnants of America’s vanishing early television history and provide to future generations. I want to believe.
Taylor Cole Miller is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and a media history content creator under the handle tvdoc. His research focuses on television histories, syndication, and queer media studies and can be found in journals like Camera Obscura and Television and New Media as well as numerous anthologies and popular press outlets. He is co-editor of the forthcoming collection The Golden Girls: Essays from the Lanai from Rutgers University Press.
