TV Show Westerns - What are your favorites/least favorites and why?

Any fans of westerns from the 1950s-present? I'm curious to hear which shows are your favorite and why they have appeal. There were some good ones and there were some bad ones.

 

I don't know if you can consider it a Western, because it's kind of a hybrid, but I always enjoyed the 1960s version of Wild Wild West. Really more of a spy show than a Western. I also liked Chuck Conners' later show Branded, which I thought had some good moments.

 

"Lonesome Dove" is my all time favourite.
Great adaptation of a classic book.
Characters who are flawed in many ways, but who struggle through to do the right thing, just like life.
To top it all a brilliant cast.

I never tire of watching it:



"I hate rude behaviour in a man"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H85APaXrJ_Q

 

Maverick, because it was intelligent
High Chaparral because of the characters
Alias Smith and Jones until Pete killed himself
Son of the Morning Star
Lonesome Dove - though the latter variants don't interest me at all

 

My two faves would probably be "Gunsmoke" and "Have Gun Will Travel".

 

Gunsmoke and Restless Gun come to mind as two of the best, both based an even better radio shows. Restless Gun was based on radio's The Six Shooter starring Jimmy Stewart!

 

If you haven't listened to the radio version of Gunsmoke, then you are really missing out on probably the best western of any format.

Here is an episode introduced by one of the writers of the first Shrek movie, Roger S.H. Schulman!

Gunsmoke Podcast 1954-06-19 (113) Going Bad (Buck and Rogerchester)


Here is Jimmy Stewart in the Six Shooter.
The Six Shooter 1953-07-15 Audition Show

Here is a fun bonus for you:

Jack Benny first spoke his famous catch phrase, "NOW CUT THAT OUT!!!" 75 years ago this week! I just aired that wonderful episode on my podcast yesterday! Here is the link to it, have a listen it just might be the most fun you will have all week!

Jack Benny Podcast 1940-05-19 (375) Northwest Passage

It includes Jack's spoof of Northwest Passage that starred Spencer Tracy and Robert Young.

 

Maybe not a "Western" in the truest sense of the word, but man, Sky King (starring Kirby Grant) had his own airplane. Who couldn't love that!




And then there's The Rifleman (starring Chuck Conners) with his way cool rifle. Developed by Sam Peckinpah, who wrote and directed many of the episodes.

 

As a kid, I loved the "kid" westerns like Roy Rogers, Rin-Tin-Tin, The Lone Ranger. But my favorite was The Range Rider with Jock Mahoney and Dick Jones, both stunt-able. I even saw them doing stunts live at a rodeo in Redwood City, CA (of all places!).



Even though I liked them when new, now I see the value in Maverick (how cool was James Garner?!), Have Gun Will Travel (Richard Boone was so dynamic), even Cheyenne, and the early Gunsmoke episodes.

 

Early Gunsmoke in black and white with Deputy Chester and when Miss Kitty ran a brothel upstairs at the Long Branch.
Have Gun Will Travel ( my all time favorite ).
The Lone Ranger

 

After having recently finished watching ''The Complete Cimarron Strip'' i think it may be my favorite TV western, fantastic show with a great theme song, terrific cast, well written stories, famous guest stars, and last but not least the sweet and lovely miss Dulcey Coopersmith.

 

Have Gun Will a Travel might have been my answer before I recently re-watched some first season episodes.

Now, whenever Richard Boone yells, "Hey Boy! Get my bags" at the Asian stereotype guy, it's cringing time!

So, I'll go with Wild Wild West, Rifleman, Rawhide, early Gunsmoke & Laredo.

 

The Rifleman...didn't miss an episode!
also...Maverick, Wyatt Earp, Have Gun Will Travel, Cheyenne,
Wanted Dead Or Alive...

 

I was never much a fan of westerns - in fact I tended to avoid them. I think I must have found the setting unrelatable, growing up the suburbs of Philadelphia. Naturally, the western format in the fifties and early sixties were all over the dial, and with only three stations to choose from, the chances of a western being on at any hour of the day was pretty good. My sisters all enjoyed some of them, and my dad surely had his favorites - GUNSMOKE, HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL, BONANZA - and I sort of tolerated GUNSMOKE, but really, I would have rather watched something else, a sitcom, a variety show, and especially science fiction. Futuristic non-reality seemed to be more appealing than anachronistic horse operas.

Now in my sixties, several western-themed movies have crept into my favorites listings. The first was HIGH NOON. The old Criterion LaserDisc promos made the movie look fascinating, but it wasn't until the DVD era that I actually sat down and watched it - and loved it.

Next came MY DARLING CLEMENTINE. The little snippet that repeatedly was shown on a M*A*S*H episode whetted my appetite. I'd find myself sucked into the movie-within-the-show, and regretted not being able to see the whole thing. So a few years ago I bought the DVD and again found it quite enjoyable.

Something about Walter Brennan must have then gotten me interested in his TV show, THE GUNS OF WILL SONNETT. I'd seen about half an episode one day on a digital subchannel and was intrigued enough to find the full series DVD set. Though the episodes are a bit chopped up for syndication and the prints are just this side of awful, I still have managed to enjoy most of the series. In fact, I notice that the new DECADES channel is going to air an episode this week - Wednesday I think, Since CBS owns the channel and the show, I'm hoping to see something that looks a little better.

I've caught an episode or two of GUNSMOKE running on MeTV and occasionally will watch some of it. Both GUNSMOKE and BONANZA air daily, but I still don't care for BONANZA.

Harry

 

If you like Clementine, then you owe it to yourself to seek out other John Ford westerns. They are on another level altogether!

 

My favorites were Kung Fu and the limited run series Hec Ramsey. I also like the current show Longmire.
Saw Laredo and the Guns of Will Sonnett were mentioned, totally forgot about those.

 

One of my many favorite tv westerns would be "Tate," which starred David McLean aka The Marlboro Man. I believe it only ran for 1 season and was cancelled. Compared to other westerns on tv, it projected a much darker image of the wild west and unlike many of the protagonists from other shows, Tate was mostly a loner who preferred to focus on his career as a bounty hunter. Tate was injured during the Civil War and lost use of his left arm, which was housed in a black leather sling-glove.

 

David Carradine was a great choice to portray "Shane" in the tv series, but apparently not everyone felt the same. The plot was intended to be a continuation of the film, so it might as well have been titled "The further adventures of Shane."

 

Nichols.

 

When I was young it was all about sci-fi but I loved 'Wild Wild West'.Especially the episodes with the mad scientist, Dr.Miguelito Lovelace played by Mchael Dunn.I think this series created steampunk.And who wouldn't want to travel across the country in their own private train?
Fios has been adding a lot of 'retro' channels lately so I'm catching a few shows that I've never seen before.I'm enjoying 'Cheyenne' starring Clint Walker.Well made with good stories and realistic locations(or is it the Warner Brothers lot).
Have to mention 'F Troop'.Saw a rerun on MeTv and was suprised how funny and seriously messed up it is(ze burgular of Bamph-ph-ph).It went right over my head as a kid.

 

When I was growing up in the 1970s I watched reruns like Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. My future wife, however, watched Bonanza, High Chaparral, and other Westerns of the 1960s. In 25 years of marriage we've influenced each other somewhat, although with the next generation my tastes have been more influential than hers, since both of our kids are fans of the various Star Treks but almost never watch Westerns.

But a fair amount of Star Trek is a rewriting of Western stories and myths into space. Gene Roddenberry, after all, in his first pitch to Grant Tinker and others at NBC in 1963 called the program "Wagon Train to the Stars."

Wagon Train was a hugely successful "epic" Western TV show that ran from 1957-1965. It was inspired in part by the movie "Wagon Master," directed by the legendary John Ford.

Some have made the case that the Western was a cultural part of the Cold War during the 1950s and 1960s. International tensions were translated into a heroic and nostalgic past. But TV Westerns, of course, were much more complicated than that.

Just as with medical shows there are life and death issues, as well as new characters each week.

The best reference book on the Western, both for movies and TV, is the "BFI Companion to the Western." Published almost 30 years ago now, it still hasn't been surpassed, and is available used from amazon. It's a coffee table book with content.

In that book, one of the things traced is the rise and fall of the TV Western. One of the first Westerns that wasn't for kiddies was Gunsmoke, which began its amazing 20-year run in 1955. James Arness, a towering 6 ft. 7 inch WW2 vet, played the gentle but firm giant on that show, which started out at 30 minutes. As others have said, the radio drama before the TV show provided them with scores of completed teleplays, which with minor changes worked for TV. The first season they made 39 episodes. The starting production budget of the show was, I read somewhere, about $40,000 an episode, which is about $400,000 today—in other words still cheap for even a 30-minute black and white show mostly confined to the same setting. But sometimes there's a certain melancholy grimness to Gunsmoke that can surprise even today, and which overcomes the obvious low budget nature of the enterprise. It slowly became more deluxe with time.

Gunsmoke was such a huge hit that soon networks were thinking more ambitiously. "Wagon Train" on NBC was not only an hour long, but had an average production budget of $100k, allowing for more location photography, big guest stars, etc. A lot of movie stars started slumming it on TV with Westerns like this, which was just one of dozens of Westerns on the air in the late 50s and early 60s.

In 1961, the contract for "Wagon Train," then one the top shows on TV, was up for renewal, and ABC stole it from NBC by offering the production company more for it. But the empire of NBC, so to speak, struck back. NBC placed a new show opposite its former hit that was designed to kill it, no matter what the cost. Thus "The Virginian" was born, a 90-minute Western in full color that was really a Western movie of the week, with a huge cast and a budget for big guest stars and lots of location photography. James Drury stars as the somewhat mysterious Virginian whose name is never revealed. This show had an average budget of about $300,000 an episode, making it the most expensive show on television at that time. Show runner Frank Price, who executive produced for several years, expressed pride many years later that The Virginian could hire the best directors, cinematographers, writers, guest stars, etc. available for television at the time. They even had original scores for almost all of the episodes, written by such composers as Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock's former favorite.

NBC succeeded in killing off its old hit show Wagon Train with The Virginian. The Virginian is probably my favorite television Western, although there are still a lot of them I haven't seen.

Anyway, this summer one of my little fun goals was to learn how to use iMovie. The task I set for myself was to do a 3-minute movie-style trailer for the fist episode of The Virginian. Here it is:

 

"Rawhide", hands down:

 

"The Loner" written by Rod Serling was his next project after the Twilight Zone. It was the "thinking man's western", but the networks as always thought folks don't like to think, so it just ran for one very interesting season. Originally telecast on September 18, 1965, and was Rod Serling's only TV western. He wrote about half of the episodes before "withdrawing" from the series, because CBS complained there wasn't enough "action" happening during his scripts, and that it was "too cerebral" {that is, more social consicous than most westerns}, and Rod ended up bitterly disappointed about the whole thing. The ratings finished the series [opposite NBC's "SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES" and ABC's "HOLLYWOOD PALACE".



Here is my commentary on the first episode. Rod Serling Podcast 1965-09-18 The Loner (01) Starring Lloyd Bridges - An Echo of Bugles

Here is the first episode.


AN ECHO OF BUGLES

Airdate September 18, 1965
Written by Rod Serling
Directed by Alex March
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Film Editor: George Gittens

CAST
Tony Bill...............Jody Merriman
Whit Bissell......................Nichols
John Hoyt........................Colonel
Lou Krugman.................Bartender
Stephen Roberts..................Doctor
Gregg Palmer....................Adjutant

A swaggering gunfighter targets an aging
Confederate veteran, and Colton steps in
to deal with the bully.

 

The Rifleman is far and away my favorite. It has a serious and dark tone I really enjoy. I am also named after the lead character (dad loves westerns). It also has one of the best intros to any television show ever.

 

I grew up watching The Rifleman with my father. For some reason he would always announce that he "hated Mark". Running joke between us.

I always thought that in the 60s genre, The Big valley was the best acted and had pretty sophisticated plots. Have Gun, Will Travel was also very good, but that show is a bit harder to find in syndication. We were never a Bonanza household.