Radio and film antecedents The
Saturday Afternoon Matinee on the radio were a pre-television phenomenon in the US which often featured Western series. Film Westerns turned
John Wayne,
Ken Maynard,
Audie Murphy,
Tom Mix, and
Johnny Mack Brown into major idols of a young audience, plus "
singing cowboys" such as
Gene Autry,
Roy Rogers and
Dale Evans,
Dick Foran,
Rex Allen,
Tex Ritter,
Ken Curtis, and
Bob Steele. Each cowboy had a co-starring horse such as Rogers' Golden Palomino,
Trigger, who became a star in his own right. 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.
Bill Pickett, an African-American
rodeo performer, also appeared in early Western films for the same audience.
1940s through early 1960s (
Sugarfoot),
Peter Brown (
Lawman),
Jack Kelly (
Maverick),
Ty Hardin (
Bronco),
James Garner (
Maverick),
Wayde Preston (Colt .45), and
John Russell (
Lawman) When the popularity of television exploded in the late 1940s and 1950s, Westerns quickly became a staple of small-screen entertainment. The first, on June 24, 1949, was the
Hopalong Cassidy show, at first edited from the
66 films made by
William Boyd. Many B-movie Westerns were aired on TV as time fillers, while a number of long-running TV Westerns became classics in their own right. The earliest TV Westerns were written primarily for a children's audience; it was not until the near-concurrent debuts of
The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp and the TV version of
Gunsmoke in 1955 that adult Westerns appeared on television, and the genre became enormously popular. Notable TV Westerns include
The Cisco Kid with
Duncan Renaldo,
The Lone Ranger with
Clayton Moore,
The Gene Autry Show with
Gene Autry,
Gunsmoke with
James Arness,
Cheyenne with
Clint Walker,
Have Gun – Will Travel with
Richard Boone,
Sugarfoot with
Will Hutchins,
Wagon Train with
Ward Bond and
Robert Horton,
Maverick with
James Garner and
Jack Kelly,
Trackdown with
Robert Culp,
Wanted Dead or Alive with
Steve McQueen,
Bronco with
Ty Hardin,
Bat Masterson with
Gene Barry,
The Rifleman with
Chuck Connors,
Rawhide with
Eric Fleming and
Clint Eastwood,
Bonanza with
Pernell Roberts and
Dan Blocker,
Laramie,
The Virginian with
James Drury and
Doug McClure,
The Big Valley with
Barbara Stanwyck,
The High Chaparral, and many others. 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?" The glut of Western series on television at the time was a target of
Newton Minow in his speech "
Television and the Public Interest," noting that while he was a fan of Westerns, there were too many of them on the air at the time, those that were on the air were too frequently emphasizing violence and juvenile plots, and it contributed to the lack of
quality television offerings (such as news, live sports, documentaries and high cultural programs) available in 1960, which he famously described as a "vast wasteland." A horse cost up to $100 a day, compared to $22.05 for an extra; 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. 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. in
Rawhide •
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. 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. By 1971, production companies had acknowledged that "the Western idea is out." The two last traditional Westerns,
Death Valley Days and
Gunsmoke, ended their runs in 1975. and
Victoria Shaw in
Cimarron Strip (1967) 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) 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 Shaolin monk, 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;
2010s and 2020s 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. 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. 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.
Yellowstone, in turn, inspired a traditionally-set Western prequel,
1883, in 2021, and another series,
1923, a year later, both of which were successes. ==See also==