Television Westerns - by Alvin H Marill (Hardcover)

About the Book

This volume looks at the Western as it was represented from the beginning of television, encompassing all manifestations of the Western, including such series as Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and The Wild, Wild West, as well as movies-of the-week, mini-series, failed pilots, animated pro...

Book Synopsis

This volume looks at the Western as it was represented from the beginning of television, encompassing all manifestations of the Western, including such series as Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and The Wild, Wild West, as well as movies-of the-week, mini-series, failed pilots, animated programs, documentaries, and even Western-themed episodes of non-Western series that provided their own spin on the genre.

Review Quotes

Alvin H. Marill's Television Westerns offers an overview of small-screen offerings that covers the last six decades, focusing on production and broadcast....The series and televised films covered are not only significant in their role as American entertainment-- many of these are, as Marrill points out, the cornerstones of popular culture-- they are part of an ongoing web of intertexuality that includes adaptations, appropriations, visual and textual references, borrowings, and inspirations in literature, music, film, and of course, television.


Any opportunity to revisit television's classic 'oaters' is a good one as far as I'm concerned, and Alvin H. Marill's Television Westerns: Six Decades of Sagebush, Sheriffs, Scalawag, and Sidewinders is essentially a survey tracing small-screen horse operas from the medium's earliest days (film transfers like Hopalong Cassidy, radio migrants like The Lone Ranger and Gunsmoke ) through the boom years of the late fifties/early sixties (covered in a chapter titled From Wagon Train and Bonanza to The Virginian and The Big Valley) and right up to the present (including David Milch's profane Deadwood and Elmore Leonard's sublime Justified).


The author of this title, a long published author of several titles in the movie, television, and music arenas, has written a book that looks at the history of the western genre from the beginning of broadcast television in the 1940s to present day. Westerns had their peak time in the 1950s and 1960s with the long-running programming of such hits as Bonanza, Wagon Train, and Maverick, with Gunsmoke and its 20-year run eclipsing them all. The volume includes production, cast, and character information on all television westerns, including hit series, movies of the week, mini series, failed pilots, animated programs, documentaries, and western-themed episodes on non-western television shows. This work touches on nearly all of the major western programming since the beginning of television and provides a nice overview of the genre as a whole.

About the Author

Alvin H. Marill (1934-2010) was the author of many books about performing arts, including The Complete Films of Edward G. Robinson. His books for Scarecrow include Keeping Score: Film and Television Music, 1988-1997 (1998), More Theatre: Stage to Screen to Television (2002), Movies Made for Television, 1964-2004 (2005), More Theatre III: Stage to Screen to Television: Since 2001 (2007), and Movies Made for Television, 2005-2009 (2010).