Laramie

too bad we cannot get the old real good series that used to be. we have stations that claim to be western channels but none of the series are ever on. why? this was one of the greats like WAGON TRAIN. Better than gunsmoke. if you ever get a chance watch it.

OK, from the very first episode I was I love with Robert Fuller and the series. I spent my youth (omg) watching every western ever made for TV. I find now that I still watch Laramie reruns on GRIT and STARZEncore . To my amazement I find the same people show up as "villains or have small roles" anywhere from one to five times a season. This I never noticed before, probably because I didn't care then. Other than Laramie I now watch John Wayne westerns. Oh well, there really isn't much on TV anymore anyway. My granddaughter got the IMDb icon for my iPad so I could look information for myself. It really is very helpful and I like it. She got tired of having to look up everything for me and I couldn't read her phone anyway.

Out of all the many TV Westerns that there are to choose from in the 1950s and early-1960s, I personally rate Laramie as the absolute best of the very best.

Very masculine, very rugged and very-very entertaining, Laramie was definitely a real action-packed TV show that easily ranks, in my books, as the ultimate epitome of the "near-perfect" cowboy-fantasy saga.

Featuring plenty of guest stars and an excellent cast of regulars, headlined by Robert Fuller, as Jess Harper, and John Smith, as Slim Sherman - Laramie proudly showcased these 2 strapping and husky, young dudes who literally lived and breathed the true "Code of the West", a set of values which existed, just as they existed, in absolute accordance with the belief in loyalty, morality, and personal pride.

Set (during the 1870s) on the very edge of a vast and spectacular frontier within the Wyoming Territory, Laramie was a serious and often good-natured show. It never skimped on the violence when it came to depicting the many hardships that were encountered by those pioneers who faithfully strove to tame the wildness of the great, old west.

Filmed in b&w (with each episode running approx. 50 minutes), Laramie is definitely a show that I highly recommend to anyone who really appreciates a superb TV Western that stands tall above all the rest.

There certainly were an awful lot of western-themed shows on tv,for close to a 2 decade run,from the early 1950's to the early 1970's !

As crowded as the tv was at that time with the westerns,remember there is always room for another good show,right? I say there is and these folks knew it too!

In my opinion,this show is very good and it is well worth watching-I like it and you might like it too! Some episodes are better than others but none of them are bad,I suggest watching at least a few episodes to get a good idea of how the show goes. Laramie has a way of growing on you,as it is quite funny and charming.

When it first premiered in 1959, Laramie seemed to be shaping up as something a bit different in what had become (quite quickly) the monotonous world of TV westerns, which had more or less degenerated into endless shows about either a loner or a couple of buddies riding the west. Here was an attempt to do something far more intriguing: a focus on two brothers, young Slim (John Smith), the nearest thing that the show had to a conventional lead, and confused kid brother (Robert Crawford, Jr., whose brother Johnny played Chuck Connors' son on the long-run Rifleman series). Their relationship was believable and complex and not quite like anything else on a western at that time, leading to many unexpected and intriguing plots. Also impressive were the two other main characters - Robert Fuller as a rather unpleasant loner who wandered in to the area and was accepted, with qualifications, as part of the group, though the brothers couldn't quite understand his melancholy personality, and Hoagy Charmichael, that wonderful musical star from the big band era, as a strangely cynical and always ironic Greek chorus-like commentator on the action. The show didn't quite take off, had only mediocre ratings, and NBC had to decide to either cancel it or 'reimagine' it. If they had done the latter, this might be recalled as one of those great one-season classics that was too 'different' to survive. Instead, NBC decided to keep it on the air but remove everything that made the show special. So gone were both the little brother and Hoagy; Slim, the conventional lead, was relatively unchanged, and Robert Fuller's "anger" was "toned down" to the point that it didn't really add up to anything any more. The show, now in color, was one more ordinary series about two cool guys riding the west together. If there was anything at all different about it now, that was the addition of Spring Byington as a sweet old lady who cared for them, like the aunt who oversees Batman and Robin in the mansion, though this only brought a 'December Bride' sentimentality to the series. Wouldn't you know it - the moment that the show became more conventional, it picked up in the ratings quite considerably and ran for three more mostly mediocre years.