Westerns on television
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.
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.
[4] Notable TV Westerns include 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.
[7] 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
MeTV, a digital broadcast channel, includes Westerns in its regular schedule as well, as does sister network Heroes & Icons.
[14] Several Westerns have episodes that have lapsed into the public domain in the United States, allowing networks and stations to carry them without cost.
