Television Westerns
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Television Westerns are a sub-genre of the Western.
The Saturday Afternoon Movie was a pre-TV phenomenon in the US which often featured western series. Audie Murphy, Tom Mix, and Johnny Mack Brown became major idols of a young audience, plus "Singing cowboys" such as Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Rex Allen. Each 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 La Rue 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].
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. A great 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. Notable TV Westerns include Gunsmoke, The Lone Ranger, The Rifleman, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Have Gun, Will Travel, Bonanza, The Big Valley, Maverick, The High Chaparral and many others. The peak year for television westerns was 1959, with 26 such shows airing during prime-time.
The 1970s saw a revision of the western, with the incorporation of many new elements. McCloud, which premiered in 1970, was essentially a fusion of the sheriff-oriented western with the modern big-city crime drama. Hec Ramsey was a western who-dunnit mystery series. 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 Chinese monk who fought only with his formidable martial art skill. 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.
The 1990s saw the networks getting into filming Western movies on their own. Like Louis L'Amour's Conagher, Tony Hillerman's The Dark Wind, The Last Outlaw, The Jack Bull etc. A few new comedies like The Cisco Kid, The Cherokee Kid, and the gritty TV series Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years.
This century started off with Louis L'Amour's Crossfire Trail, Monte Walsh, and Hillerman's Coyote Waits, and A Thief of Time. DVDs offer a second life to TV series like Peacemakers, and HBO's Deadwood.
In 2002, a show called Firefly (created by Joss Whedon) mixed the Western genre with science fiction. Closure took place in the movie Serenity.
It is clear that the Western is not dead, but rather has moved smoothly from the first color TV series, The Cisco Kid, through the half-hour shoot'em-ups, such as The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp and Have Gun — Will Travel, of the 1950s, to the later hour-long adult westerns and the slickly packaged made-for-TV westerns of today.
