Television Westerns are programs with settings in the later half of the 19th century in the American Old West, Western Canada and Mexico during the period from about 1860 to the end of the so-called "Indian Wars". More recent entries in the Western genre have used the neo-Western subgenre, placing events in the modern day, or the space Western subgenre but still draw inspiration from the outlaw attitudes prevalent in traditional Western productions.
When television became popular in the late 1940s and 1950s, TV Westerns quickly became an audience favorite, with 30 such shows airing at prime time by 1959. Traditional Westerns faded in popularity in the late 1960s, while new shows fused Western elements with other types of shows, such as family drama, mystery thrillers, and crime drama. In the 1990s and 2000s, slickly packaged made-for-TV movie Westerns were introduced.
Other B-movie series were Lash LaRue and the Durango Kid. Herbert Jeffreys, as Bob Blake with his horse Stardust, appeared in a number of movies made for African American audiences in the days of segregated movie theaters.[1]Bill Pickett, an African-American rodeo performer, also appeared in early Western films for the same audience.[2]
By 1959, four years after the boom in TV Westerns began, thirty such shows were on television during prime time; none had been canceled that season, while 14 new ones had appeared. In one week in March 1959, eight of the top ten shows were Westerns, and an estimated $125 million in toys based on TV Westerns would be sold that year. Many were "four-wall Westerns", filmed indoors in three days or less with scripts of poor quality, and the genre's enormous popularity mystified even its creators; TIME quoted one of the about 100 writers for TV Westerns as wondering "I don't get it. Why do people want to spend so much time staring at the wrong end of a horse?"[4]
A horse cost up to $100 a day, compared to $22.05 for an extra;[4] increasing production costs caused most action half-hour series vanishing in the early 1960s to be replaced by hour long television shows, increasingly in color.[5] Two unusual Western series of this era are Zorro, set in early California under Spanish rule, and the British/Australian Western Whiplash set in 1850/60's Australia with four scripts by Gene Roddenberry.
Examples
The Lone Ranger was an American long-running early radio and television show created by George W. Trendle and developed by writer Fran Striker. The titular character is a masked Texas Ranger in the American Old West, who gallops about righting injustices, usually with the aid of a clever and laconic Native American companion named Tonto, and his horse Silver.
The Roy Rogers Show was a black and white American television series that ran for six seasons from December 30, 1951, to June 9, 1957, on NBC, with a total of 100 episodes. The series starred Roy Rogers, Pat Brady, and Dale Evans. The show started airing in France on March 5, 1962. The series was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1955 for Best Western or Adventure Series
Rawhide was a television Western series which aired on the American network CBS from 1959 to 1966. It starred Eric Fleming and launched the career of Clint Eastwood. Its premiere episode reached the top 20 in the Nielsen ratings. Rawhide was the fourth longest-running American TV Western, beaten only by nine years of The Virginian and Wagon Train, 14 years of Bonanza, and 20 years of Gunsmoke. The typical Rawhide story involved drovers who would meet people on the trail and get drawn into solving whatever problem they presented or were confronting.
Late 1960s through 1980s
Traditional Westerns began to disappear from television in the late 1960s and early 1970s as color television became ubiquitous. With the exception of the short-lived The Cowboys in 1974, 1968 was the last season any new traditional Westerns debuted on television; by 1969, after pressure from parental advocacy groups who claimed Westerns were too violent for television, all three of the major networks ceased airing new Western series.[6] Demographic pressures and overall burnout from the format may have also been a factor as viewers became bored and disinterested with the glut of Westerns on the air at the time.[7] By 1971, production companies had acknowledged that "the Western idea is out."[8] The two last traditional Westerns, Death Valley Days and Gunsmoke, ended their runs in 1975.
While the traditional Westerns mostly died out in the late 1960s, more modernized Westerns, incorporating story concepts from outside the traditional genre, began appearing on television shortly thereafter. A number of the new shows downplayed the traditional violent elements of Westerns, for example by having the main characters go unarmed and/or seek to avoid conflicts, or by emphasizing fantasy, comedy or family themes. The Wild Wild West, which ran from 1965 to 1969, combined Westerns with science fiction (what later would be termed steampunk) and an espionage-thriller format in the spirit of the recently popularized James Bond franchise. F Troop was a satirical sitcom that made fun of the genre. The limited-run McCloud, which premiered in 1970, was essentially a fusion of the sheriff-oriented Western with the modern big-city crime drama. Its companion series Hec Ramsey was a lighthearted who-dunnit mystery series set in the late Western era, starring Richard Boone (previously of the traditional Western Have Gun, Will Travel; Boone described the characters in each series as very similar[9]) as a retired gunfighter turned detective. Cimarron Strip, a lavish 90-minute 1967 series starring Stuart Whitman as a U.S. Marshal, was canceled after a single season primarily because of its unprecedented expense. Nichols featured former Maverick star James Garner as a motorcycle-riding, unarmed peacemaker in a late-era Western setting. The low-budget sitcom Dusty's Trail was an Old West adaptation of Gilligan's Island, complete with the star of the earlier show, Bob Denver. Little House on the Prairie was set on the frontier in the time period of the Western, but was essentially a family drama. Kung Fu was in the tradition of the itinerant gunfighter Westerns, but the main character was a Shaolinmonk, the son of an American father and a Chinese mother, who fought only with his formidable martial art skill. Bruce Lee had proposed a series with a similar concept, The Warrior, but studios rejected it;[8] it would eventually be produced over 40 years after Lee's death. The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams was a family adventure show about a gentle mountain man with an uncanny connection to wildlife who helps others who visit his wilderness refuge. Dallas took the soap opera genre and put it into a Western setting, with established TV Western star Jim Davis as patriarch Jock Ewing.
Examples
Alias Smith and Jones, which aired on ABC from January 1971 to January 1973, was inspired by the success of the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The main characters are two wanted bank robbers on the run under false identities, who now wish to reform, and have been secretly promised a pardon by the governor on the condition that they stay out of trouble until some unspecified future time. They must deal with people and situations they encounter while on the run, without giving away their true identities or committing any further criminal acts. Like Butch Cassidy, the series is a Western with buddy film and comedy-drama elements.
The Young Riders aired on ABC from September 20, 1989, to July 23, 1992, for three seasons. The show followed a group of riders for the fabled Pony Express which operated 1860–1861.
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman was an American Western/dramatic television series created by Beth Sullivan. It ran on CBS for six seasons, from January 1, 1993, to May 16, 1998, and won multiple Emmy awards.
Walker, Texas Ranger was a long-running Western/crime drama series, set in the modern era, in the United States, that starred and later was produced by Chuck Norris. It ran on CBS for nine seasons, from April 21, 1993, to May 19, 2001. For most of their time on air, Dr. Quinn and Walker aired on the same Saturday night lineup. Walker would receive a reboot in 2021, with a prequel, Walker: Independence, following in 2022.
Series with Western themes that debuted in the 2010s include Justified, about a Western-style vigilante U.S. Marshal based in modern rural Kentucky, which debuted in 2010 on FX; Hell on Wheels, about the construction of the First transcontinental railroad across the United States, which debuted in 2011 on AMC; and Longmire, about a modern-day Wyoming sheriff, which debuted in 2012 on A&E. The Mandalorian (2019) is a space Western set within the Star Wars franchise and universe, with its lead character, a Mandalorian, roaming the galactic frontier and borrowing character traits from Clint Eastwood.[12]
With the growth of cable television and direct broadcast satellites, reruns of Westerns have become more common. Upon its launch in 1996, TV Land carried a block of Westerns on Sundays; the network still airs Bonanza and the color episodes of Gunsmoke to the present day, which make up several hours of their daytime schedule. Encore Westerns, part of the Encore slate of premium channels, airs blocks of Western series in the morning and in the afternoon, while the channel airs Western films the rest of the day. MeTV, a digital broadcast channel, includes Westerns in its regular schedule as well, as does sister network Heroes & Icons. The family oriented INSP and Grit, another digital broadcast channel, also carry Westerns on its daytime schedules. INSP, previously a televangelism network, had such success with its Westerns that it adopted a nearly all-Western format in 2022.[13] Several Westerns have episodes that have lapsed into the public domain in the United States, allowing networks and stations to carry them without cost.
Yellowstone, a neo-Western that debuted in 2018, jumped in ratings over the course of its third and fourth seasons to become one of cable television's most popular programs.[14][15]Yellowstone, in turn, inspired a traditionally-set Western prequel, 1883, in 2021, and another series, 1923, a year later, both of which were successes.
Clinton Eastwood Jr. is an American actor and film director. After achieving success in the Western TV series Rawhide, Eastwood rose to international fame with his role as the "Man with No Name" in Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy of spaghetti Westerns during the mid-1960s and as antihero cop Harry Callahan in the five Dirty Harry films throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These roles, among others, have made Eastwood an enduring cultural icon of masculinity. Elected in 1986, Eastwood served for two years as the mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.
The Western is a genre of fiction typically set in the American frontier between the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the closing of the frontier in 1890, and commonly associated with folk tales of the Western United States, particularly the Southwestern United States, as well as Northern Mexico and Western Canada.
Billy Dennis Weaver was an American actor and president of the Screen Actors Guild, best known for his work in television and films from the early 1950s until just before his death in 2006. Weaver's two most famous roles were as Marshal Matt Dillon's trusty deputy Chester Goode on the western Gunsmoke and as Deputy Marshal Sam McCloud on the police drama McCloud. He starred in the 1971 television film Duel, the first film of director Steven Spielberg. He is also remembered for his role as the twitchy motel attendant in Orson Welles's film Touch of Evil (1958).
Anne Helm is a retired Canadian-born actress and children's author, who primarily appeared in guest roles on episodes of various American television series. Her few film roles include playing Elvis Presley's love interest in the 1962 film Follow That Dream. Helm had two recurring roles, playing Molly Pierce in five episodes during the 85-episode run of the mid-1960s series Run for Your Life and playing the minor role of nurse Mary Briggs in an unknown number of episodes of the daily soap opera General Hospital from 1971 to 1973.
The "rural purge" refers to the mass cancellation in the early 1970s of rural-themed television programs by American networks, in particular CBS. The term was coined within the entertainment industry, although its exact provenance is unclear. The majority of these cancellations occurred at the end of the 1970–71 television season. In addition to rural-themed shows such as Mayberry R.F.D., The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres, the cancellations ended several highly rated variety shows that had been on CBS since the beginning of television broadcasting. CBS saw a dramatic change in direction with the shift, moving away from shows with rural themes and toward more appeal to urban and suburban audiences.
Herman Miller was a Hollywood film writer and producer.
Claude Aubrey Akins was an American character actor. He played Sonny Pruit in Movin' On, a 1974–1976 American drama series about a trucking team, Sheriff Lobo on the 1979–1981 television series, and a variety of other film and television roles.
Rawhide may refer to:
Rawhide is an American Western television series starring Eric Fleming and Clint Eastwood. The show aired for eight seasons on the CBS network on Friday nights from January 9, 1959, to September 3, 1965, before moving to Tuesday nights from September 14, 1965, until December 7, 1965, with a total of 217 black-and-white episodes. The series was produced and sometimes directed by Charles Marquis Warren, who also produced early episodes of Gunsmoke. The show is remembered by many for its theme song, "Rawhide".
INSP is an American digital cable television network that features primarily westerns and is headquartered in Indian Land, South Carolina - a suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina.
A singing cowboy was a subtype of the archetypal cowboy hero of early Western films. It references real-world campfire side ballads in the American frontier. The original cowboys sang of life on the trail with all the challenges, hardships, and dangers encountered while pushing cattle for miles up the trails and across the prairies. This continues with modern vaquero traditions and within the genre of Western music, and its related New Mexico, Red Dirt, Tejano, and Texas country music styles. A number of songs have been written and made famous by groups like the Sons of the Pioneers and Riders in the Sky and individual performers such as Marty Robbins, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, Bob Baker and other "singing cowboys". Singing in the wrangler style, these entertainers have served to preserve the cowboy as a unique American hero.
Thomas Morgan Woodward was an American actor who is best known for his recurring role as Marvin "Punk" Anderson on the television soap opera Dallas and for his portrayal of Boss Godfrey, the sunglasses-wearing "man with no eyes", in the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke. On TV, he was a familiar guest star on cowboy shows. On the long-running Western Gunsmoke, he played 16 different characters in 19 episodes, the most such appearances of any actor on the show. He also had a recurring role on The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp.
Theodore Ian Post was an American director of film and television. Highly prolific, Post directed numerous episodes of well-known television series including Rawhide, Gunsmoke, and The Twilight Zone as well as blockbuster films such as Hang 'Em High, Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Magnum Force.
Paul Alden Brinegar Jr. was an American character actor best known for his roles in three Western series: The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Rawhide, and Lancer.
Eric Fleming was an American actor known primarily for his role as Gil Favor in the long-running CBS Western television series Rawhide.
Charles Marquis Warren was an American motion picture and television writer, producer, and director who specialized in Westerns. Among his notable career achievements were his involvement in creating the television series Rawhide and his work in adapting the radio series Gunsmoke for television.
Western comics is a comics genre usually depicting the American Old West frontier and typically set during the late nineteenth century. The term is generally associated with an American comic books genre published from the late 1940s through the 1950s. Western comics of the period typically featured dramatic scripts about cowboys, gunfighters, lawmen, bounty hunters, outlaws, and Native Americans. Accompanying artwork depicted a rural America populated with such iconic images as guns, cowboy hats, vests, horses, saloons, ranches, and deserts, contemporaneous with the setting.
Daniel Marvin Sheridan was an Irish-American actor who appeared in more than thirty-five television series between 1957 and his death at the age of forty-six in 1963. He was cast in forty-one episodes of the ABC/Warner Brothers western series, Lawman, usually as the bartender, Jake Summers.
Contemporary Western is a subgenre of the Western genre that includes contemporary settings and uses Old West themes, archetypes, and motifs, such as a rebellious antihero, open plains and desert landscapes, or gunfights. This sub-genre includes the post-Western, neo-Western, and urban Western genres that include "the cowboy cult" in a modern setting that involves the audience's feelings and understanding of Western movies. A neo-Western can be said to use Western themes set in the present day. According to Stephen Teo in Eastern Westerns: Film and Genre Outside and Inside Hollywood, there is little difference between the neo-Western and post-Western, and the terms may often be used interchangeably.
Magers, Boyd, and Michael G. Fitzgerald. Westerns women: interviews with 50 leading ladies of movie and television westerns from the 1930s to the 1960s (McFarland, 2004) [ISBNmissing]
Marill, Alvin H. Television Westerns: Six Decades of Sagebrush Sheriffs, Scalawags, and Sidewinders (Scarecrow Press, 2011) [ISBNmissing]
Rollins, Peter, ed. Hollywood's West: the American frontier in film, television, and history (University Press of Kentucky, 2005) [ISBNmissing]
Yoggy, Gary A. Riding the Video Range: The Rise and Fall of the Western on Television (McFarland & Company, 1995) [ISBNmissing]
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