Some one-hundred-odd years ago, a motley collection of tough mustaches galloped across the West and left behind a raft of legends and legerdemains, and it seems a reasonable conjecture that if there are any television sets up in cowboy heaven and any one of these rough-and-wooly nail-eaters could see with what careless abandon their names and exploits are being bandied about, they're very likely turning over in their graves—or worse, getting out of them.
Which gives you a clue as to the proceedings that will begin in just a moment, when one Mr. Rance McGrew, a 3,000-buck-a-week phoney-baloney discovers that this week's current edition of make-believe is being shot on location—and that location is the Twilight Zone.Actor Rance McGrew, who stars in a TV series as the fictional heroic marshal of the same name, arrives late to shoot the final scenes of an episode in which his character pursues Jesse James.
Suddenly, Rance finds himself in a real Old West saloon, where he is confronted by the real Jesse, who says that he, Billy the Kid, and other famous outlaws are not pleased with the way that they are portrayed on Rance's show and consider him a fraud who makes his living off the reputations of true gunslingers before challenging him to a fast draw showdown.
Jesse insists that the episode be revised so that the actor playing him throws Rance out of a saloon window and escapes instead.
The evolution of the so-called 'adult' western, and the metamorphosis of one Rance McGrew, formerly phony-baloney, now upright citizen with a preoccupation with all things involving tradition, truth and cowpoke predecessors.