Television Westerns: Six Decades of Sagebrush Sheriffs, Scalawags, and Sidewinders (review)

Jane Hilton. KENNY AND JOANNE GOODE, POWDERMONKEY (EXPLOSIVES EXPERT), CORTEZ, COLORADO. 2007.

©Jane Hilton.

From the 1950s onward, tales of lawmen and outlaws, one-horse towns and wide open spaces, the coming of the railway and the vanishing of the frontier, have all been brought to life on American television, serving as mainstays of popular entertainment. Alvin H. Marill's Television Westerns offers an overview of these small-screen offerings that covers the last six decades—focusing on production and broadcast rather than cultural analysis—an ambitious task for this concise volume, the last of the author's career. Marill is well known for his numerous publications, among them Keeping Score: Film and Television Music, 1988-1997 (2005) and his two volumes dedicated to Movies Made for Television (2010).

Marill's discussion of televised Westerns begins with late 1940s Western programming aimed at children's audiences. These early programs, often local, included puppet features such as Howdy Doody, The Adventures of Cyclone Malone, Rex Trailer's Oky Doky Ranch, and The Buffalo Billy Show. From these emerged the well-known series that have come to define early televised Westerns: Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, The Gene Autry Show, The Cisco Kid, and The Roy Rogers Show. The volume's examination of the genre's life on the small screen ends, essentially, with HBO's Deadwood—though very brief mention is given to Justified (unfortunately, referred to in the text as Justice). The final episode of Deadwood, for Marill, signals the genre's ride into the sunset of televised entertainment.

The volume's twelve chapters treat the televised Western thematically, with extensive overviews covering powerhouse series such as Wagon Train, Bonanza, The Virginian, The Big Valley, and made-for-television Westerns, including The Over-the-Hill Gang and Purgatory, along with chapters on miniseries, pilots, cartoons, documentaries, and Western-themed episodes in non-Western series such as The Dick Van Dyke Show, Superman, I Dream of Jeannie, and Star Trek. The content of these chapters is bracketed by brief chapters of introduction and conclusion, in which the author offers commentary on the importance and impact of Westerns on TV.

Of particular interest is an early chapter on "The Western, Disney Style," which discusses programming offered by Disney, Kraft, Philco, and others that provided American viewers with romanticized historical fiction in formats that were undoubtedly familiar from other Disney products. This was, as Marill notes, a pivotal time for the televised Western, as the unprecedented popularity of shows such as Davy Crockett assured a place for frontier tales in the cultural economy of American entertainment. Marill presents readers with a comprehensive elaboration of televised Westerns, interrelating material typically covered in volumes focused on individual anthologies or production companies.

However, the volume also offers Westerns scholars considerable frustration in its brief and sometimes superficial discussion of many of the topics covered. This uneven treatment works in the favor of well-known, long-running series and made-for-TV movies but shortchanges many less-central topics, such as cartoons and Western-themed episodes, with some chapters as brief as six or eight pages. As might be expected, the brevity of these treatments leads to numerous omissions and, in many cases, citation, rather than the discussion afforded entries in other areas. While these chapters suggest that much ground exists to be explored in their respective topics, those explorations are not carried out thoroughly here.

The information presented is, nonetheless, valuable to media scholars who approach the book with a careful eye toward making the most of the volume's strengths. The series and televised films covered are not only significant in their role as American entertainment—many of these are, as Marill points out, the cornerstones of popular culture—they are part of an ongoing web of intertextuality that includes adaptations, appropriations, visual and textual references, borrowings, and inspirations in literature, music, film, and, of course, television.