Television Westerns are a sub-genre of the Western, a genre of film, fiction, drama, television programming, etc., in which stories are set primarily 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."
When television became popular in the late 1940s and 1950s, TV westerns quickly became an audience favorite. The peak year for television westerns was 1959, with 26 such shows airing during prime-time. 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, hour-long westerns and slickly packaged made-for-TV movie westerns were introduced. As well, new elements were once again added to the Western formula, such as the Western-science fiction show Firefly, created by Joss Whedon in 2002.
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The Saturday Afternoon Matinee on the radio were a pre-TV phenomenon in the US which often featured western series. Film westerns turned 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, Rex Allen. 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 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. Many B-movie Westerns were aired on TV as time fillers,[1] 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, Laramie, Have Gun, Will Travel, Bonanza, The Virginian, Wagon Train, The Big Valley, Maverick, The High Chaparral , The Gene Autry Show, Sugarfoot, Cheyenne, and many others.
The peak year for television westerns was 1959, with 26 such shows airing during prime-time. In one week in March 1959, eight of the top ten shows were westerns.[1] Increasing costs of production (a horse cost up to $100 a day)[1] led to most action half hour series vanishing in the early 1960s to be replaced by hour long television shows, increasingly in color.[2] Two unusual westerns 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.
Traditional Westerns began to disappear from television in the late 1960s and early 1970s as color television became ubiquitous. 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.[3] The two last traditional Westerns, Bonanza and Gunsmoke, ended their runs in 1973 and 1975 respectively. This may have been the result of an ongoing trend toward more urban-oriented programming that occurred in the early 1970s known as the "rural purge," though only two Westerns (NBC's The Virginian and The High Chaparral) was canceled in the peak season of the purge in 1971. This period saw a revision of the western, with the incorporation of many new elements. The Wild Wild West, which ran from 1965 to 1969, combined Westerns with heavy use of steampunk and an espionage-thriller format in the spirit of the recently popularized James Bond franchise. 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 Shaolin monk, the son of an American father and a Chinese mother, 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.
Little House on the Prairie was an American one-hour dramatic television program that aired on the NBC network from September 11, 1974 to March 21, 1983. During the 1982-83 television season, with the departure of Michael Landon, the series was broadcast with the new title Little House: A New Beginning. A miniseries called The Little House Years was aired in 1979.
The Young Riders premiered in the fall of 1989 and ran for 3 seasons. The show followed a group of riders for the fabled Pony Express which operated 1860-1861.
The 1990s saw the networks getting into filming Western movies on their own. Like Louis L'Amour's Conagher starring Sam Elliott and Katharine Ross, 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.
Zorro was remade with Duncan Regehr for The Family Channel filmed in Madrid, Spain.
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman was multi-Emmy Award winning western/dramatic television series in the United States, created by Beth Sullivan. It ran on CBS for six seasons, from January 1, 1993 to May 16, 1998.
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.
In the 1993-1994 season, the Fox network aired a science fiction western called The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., which lasted for only 27 episodes. In the fall of 1995, the UPN network aired its own science fiction western, Legend, which ended after 12 episodes.
Western TV shows from the 2000s included the syndicated Queen of Swords filmed in Almeria Spain, Louis L'Amour's Crossfire Trail starring Tom Selleck, 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. Justified is a series on FX that debuted in 2010, about a Western-style vigilante U.S. Marshal based in modern rural Kentucky.
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 as of 2011. 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.