page_title: Westerns on television
section_title: 1940s through early 1960s
hierarchical_section_title: Westerns on television / History / 1940s through early 1960s
caption_attribution_description: Photo of James Garner as Bart Maverick and Jack Kelly as Bret Maverick in the episode "Hostage" from the television program Maverick.
context_page_description: Television westerns are a subgenre 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". More recent entries in the Western genre have placed events in the modern day but still draw inspiration from the outlaw attitudes prevalent in traditional Western productions.
  When television became popular in the late 1940s and 1950s, TV westerns quickly became an audience favorite, with 30 such shows airing during prime-time in 1959. 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, slickly packaged made-for-TV movie westerns were introduced.
context_section_description: 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, while a number of long-running TV Westerns became classics in their own right. The earliest TV westerns were written primarily for a children's audience; it was not until the near-concurrent debuts of The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp and the TV version of Gunsmoke in 1955 that adult Westerns appeared on television, and the genre became enormously popular. Notable TV Westerns include The Lone Ranger, The Gene Autry Show, Gunsmoke, Cheyenne, Have Gun – Will Travel, Sugarfoot, Wagon Train, Maverick, Trackdown, Wanted Dead or Alive, Bronco, The Rifleman, Rawhide, Bonanza, Laramie, The Virginian, The Big Valley, 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. In one week in March 1959, eight of the top ten shows were westerns, and an estimated $125 million in toys based on TV westerns would be sold that year. Many were "four-wall westerns", filmed indoors in three days or less with scripts of poor quality, and the genre's enormous popularity mystified even its creators; TIME quoted one of the about 100 writers for TV westerns as wondering "I don't get it. Why do people want to spend so much time staring at the wrong end of a horse?"
  A horse cost up to $100 a day, compared to $22.05 for an extra; increasing production costs caused most action half-hour series vanishing in the early 1960s to be replaced by hour long television shows, increasingly in color. 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.
caption: James Garner and Jack Kelly in Maverick (1957)
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