The Westerner

This series reminds me another one called THE LONER. Same period, same scenery and atmosphere with a kind of anti hero travelling from a place to another and who meets all kinds of people. As it was in the LONER, you deal here with pretty good characters study all over the show, far from those predictable garbage stuff which you find elsewhere in western series.

Sam Peckinpah had been active on such early TV adult westerns as Gunsmoke and The Rifleman, but he hoped to and dreamed of creating the most authentic TV cowboy show of all. Originally to have been titled "The Lone Westerner," it finally reached network TV in the fall of 1960, and lasted maybe thirteen weeks before being unceremoniously canceled. Meanwhile, Bonanza - the most stupid and least realistic western of all time - was allowed to continue even though it didn't initially score in the ratings. But I'm off track. The Westerner was every bit as good as Peckinpah (who wrote some episodes, directed others) wanted it to be. Attention to historic detail was fabulous, and it had the kind of grim, no-nonsense qualities that made Gunsmoke so terrific during its first three seasons - when it was, briefly, the High Noon of TV westerns rather than the corny folksy show it all too quickly degenerated into. Keith had a John Wayne kind of quality that served the show admirably while that underrated character actor John Dehner played his sometimes sidekick, Burgundy Smith. Throw in the dog from Old Yeller (here called Brown, which was his real name) and some intriguingly anecdotal tales, all very anti-heroic, and you had a show that captured the escapades of an ordinary saddle tramp in a way that no other did. Tom Gries, who later mounted the magnificent western movie Will Penny, tried out some of the plots and characters of that 1968 film here. Look for such later Peckinpah stock company members as Warren Oates in the varied casts.

Probably too downbeat and "adult" for its times, the series soon vanished from network screens. At the age of eleven, having been beguiled by advance advertising of the series, I was bewildered when it disappeared before I could locate it on the schedule. In retrospect it seems like the ideal vehicle to make Brian Keith a top star-something that never quite happened.

It seems a brilliant touch of writing to make Dave Blassengame (what a name for a hero) an illiterate, itinerant cowpoke with the soul of a knight errant. He is Palidan without the cultural overlay. Guest appearances by distinguished journeyman actors like Slim Pickens, Michael Ansara, Robert Culp and others too numerous to include in this space make "the Westerner" a treat for me-especially when I had to wait forty-five years for it to appear on cable T.V. .

This show was nothing less than brilliant. I saw it when it was first out, when I was in my last year of high school. I knew it was too good to be true then, and, sure enough, I was right.

It is to westerns on television what Fawlty Towers was to comedy. Yes, it was that good...

I became a Peckinpah fan through The Wild Bunch, first saw it probably 1980. I never knew he had his own TV show back in 1960. I found out about The Westerner through a guest star overlap with Have Gun Will Travel. (That's a great show too.)

I found a homemade set of The Westerner DVDs on eBay and decided to take a chance. I'm two episodes into the 13 total episodes. In a word, "Wow!"

The director packs so much into the 25-minute run time. Brian Keith is outstanding as the lead, and the supporting characters have depth. Even the dog Brown has depth, and this has been established in only a few quick scenes over the two episodes. There's violence, but it fits the plot lines and isn't sensationalized or made to look operatic as in later Peckinpah works.

Recommended for western fans who value the steak over the sizzle.