Westerns on television

Television Westerns are programs with settings 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 used the neo-Western subgenre, placing events in the modern day, or the space Western subgenre, but still draw inspiration from the outlaw attitudes prevalent in traditional Western productions.

When television became popular in the late 1940s and 1950s, Westerns quickly became an audience favorite, with 30 such shows airing at prime time by 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.

History

Radio and film antecedents

The Saturday Afternoon Matinee on the radio were a pre-television phenomenon in the US which often featured Western series. 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. Each cowboy had a co-starring horse such as Rogers' Golden Palomino, Trigger, who became a star in his own right.

Other B-movie series were Lash LaRue and the Durango Kid. Herbert Jeffreys, as Bob Blake with his horse Stardust, appeared in a number of movies made for African American audiences in the days of segregated movie theaters.