Телевестерны: История и эволюция жанра

Television genre based on the American Old West

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, TV 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.

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. Bill Pickett, an African American rodeo performer, also appeared in early Western films for the same audience.

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 with Clayton Moore, The Gene Autry Show with Gene Autry, Gunsmoke with James Arness, Cheyenne with Clint Walker, Have Gun – Will Travel with Richard Boone, Sugarfoot with Will Hutchins, Wagon Train with Ward Bond and Robert Horton, Maverick with James Garner and Jack Kelly, Trackdown with Robert Culp, Wanted Dead or Alive with Steve McQueen, Bronco with Ty Hardin, Bat Masterson with Gene Barry, The Rifleman, Rawhide with Eric Fleming and Clint Eastwood, Bonanza with Pernell Roberts and Dan Blocker, Laramie, The Virginian with James Drury and Doug McClure, The Big Valley with Barbara Stanwyck, 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 Western 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.

The Lone Ranger was an American long running early radio and television show created by George W. Trendle and developed by writer Fran Striker. The titular character is a masked Texas Ranger in the American Old West, who gallops about righting injustices, usually with the aid of a clever and laconic Native American companion named Tonto, and his horse Silver. The Roy Rogers Show was a black and white American television series that ran for six seasons from December 30, 1951, to June 9, 1957, on NBC, with a total of 100 episodes. The series starred Roy Rogers, Pat Brady, and Dale Evans. The show started airing in France on March 5, 1962. The series was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1955 for Best Western or Adventure Series
Rawhide was a television Western series which aired on the American network CBS from 1959 to 1966. It starred Eric Fleming and launched the career of Clint Eastwood. Its premiere episode reached the top 20 in the Nielsen ratings. Rawhide was the fourth longest running American TV Western, beaten only by nine years of The Virginian and Wagon Train, 14 years of Bonanza, and 20 years of Gunsmoke. The typical Rawhide story involved drovers who would meet people on the trail and get drawn into solving whatever problem they presented or were confronting.

Traditional Westerns began to disappear from television in the late 1960s and early 1970s as color television became ubiquitous. With the exception of the short lived The Cowboys in 1974, 1968 was the last season any new traditional Westerns debuted on television; by 1969, after pressure from parental advocacy groups who claimed Westerns were too violent for television, all three of the major networks ceased airing new Western series. Demographic pressures and overall burnout from the format may have also been a factor as viewers became bored and disinterested with the glut of Westerns on the air at the time. By 1971, production companies had acknowledged that "the Western idea is out." The two last traditional Westerns, Death Valley Days and Gunsmoke, ended their runs in 1975. This may have been the result of an ongoing trend toward more urban oriented programming that occurred in the early 1970s known as the "rural purge;" the changing culture of the late 1960s was less friendly to the traditional values espoused by most Westerns. Only two Westerns (NBC's The Virginian and The High Chaparral) were canceled in the peak season of the purge in 1971. Bonanza ended its run in 1973, largely due to the abrupt death of Dan Blocker. The rise in popularity of science fiction television series in the U. S. also coincided with the decline of the Western.) as a retired gunfighter turned detective. Cimarron Strip, a lavish 90 minute 1967 series starring Stuart Whitman as a U. S. Marshal, was canceled after a single season primarily because of its unprecedented expense. Nichols featured former Maverick star James Garner as a motorcycle riding, unarmed peacemaker in a late era Western setting. The low budget sitcom Dusty's Trail was an Old West adaptation of Gilligan's Island, complete with the star of the earlier show, Bob Denver. Little House on the Prairie was set on the frontier in the time period of the Western, but was essentially a family drama. Kung Fu was in the tradition of the itinerant gunfighter Westerns, but the main character was a Shaolin monk, the son of an American father and a Chinese mother, who fought only with his formidable martial art skill. Bruce Lee had proposed a series with a similar concept, The Warrior, but studios rejected it;

Series with Western themes that debuted in the 2010s include Justified, about a Western style vigilante U. S. Marshal based in modern rural Kentucky, which debuted in 2010 on FX; Hell on Wheels, about the construction of the First transcontinental railroad across the United States, which debuted in 2011 on AMC; and Longmire, about a modern day Wyoming sheriff, which debuted in 2012 on A&E. The Mandalorian (2019) is a space Western set within the Star Wars franchise and universe, with its lead character, a Mandalorian, roaming the galactic frontier and borrowing character traits from Clint Eastwood. With the growth of cable television and direct broadcast satellites, reruns of Westerns have become more common. Upon its launch in 1996, TV Land carried a block of Westerns on Sundays; the network still airs Bonanza and the color episodes of Gunsmoke to the present day, which make up several hours of their daytime schedule. Encore Westerns, part of the Encore slate of premium channels, airs blocks of Western series in the morning and in the afternoon, while the channel airs Western films the rest of the day. MeTV, a digital broadcast channel, includes Westerns in its regular schedule as well, as does sister network Heroes & Icons. The family oriented INSP and Grit, another digital broadcast channel, also carry Westerns on its daytime schedules. INSP, previously a televangelism network, had such success with its Westerns that it adopted a nearly all Western format in 2022. Several Westerns have episodes that have lapsed into the public domain in the United States, allowing networks and stations to carry them without cost. Yellowstone, a neo Western that debuted in 2018, jumped in ratings over the course of its third and fourth seasons to become one of cable television's most popular programs. Yellowstone, in turn, inspired a traditionally set Western prequel, 1883, in 2021, and another series, 1923, a year later, both of which were successes.