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Richard L. Bare directed some of the series best episodes, but this isn't one of them. It's not terrible in any way, but the story of a treacherous Mustang round-up meanders slowly along the studio set trail (with the help of some real outdoor stock footage).

In addition to Cheyenne, the central characters are played by Diane Brewster and Ross Elliot as a dull, disinterested couple, and veteran Western movie bad guy, Robert Wilkie, who sports a comically fake looking scruffy beard.

In order to spark some life into the script, there's some long winded comic relief about bad trail food, and a number of strained plot contrivances. There's little action until the very end.

If you're selectively choosing Cheyenne episodes to view, you can safely skip this one. You won't be missing much.

In this installment, good guy for hire Cheyenne is a detective employed by a cattleman's association. His investigation into the death of a suspected cattle rustler sets off a series of violent events.

"The Law Man" had the ingredients for an above average episode, but suffers badly from the precocious, icky kid treatment. (Paul Engle is the offending little creep as "Buddy") In fact, the little s***, with the help of a sticky script, overacts badly, and it stinks up the entire story. With that said, there are solid performances from Andrea King as a sweet saloon girl and Grant Withers as sheriff turned crooked cattleman. The plot, while quite routine, allows for a good deal of shoot-em-up action.

Overall, Cheyenne, at this point in the second season, was becoming a bit more predictable. Still, the shows would open with an exciting prequel scene that would spark the action to follow. In later seasons, and with all other Warner TV escapades, the opening scene would simply be an exciting moment lifted from the body of the show. While this spoiler technique was intended to draw the audience in, it was a much lazier and formulaic production tactic than the original scene opener.

There was still a real emphasis on production quality and polish in the second season. The stylish opening and closing lithographs coupled to stirring theme music, became the memorable presentation template for Warner TV Westerns to follow.

The word "Argonaut" might not be on the tip of many tongues, but long time movie fans won't have to strain their brains very hard to identify the origins of this episode.

TV audiences in 1955 didn't have the ability to watch the iconic Treasure of Sierra Madre on home video from their easy chair, so instead, they had to settle for this cringe worthy Warner TV retread of their own movie property. The series producers must have counted on the audience's short memory too, as the movie was less than seven years old at the time of this broadcast.

The Warner Westerns and detective shows of the 50's notoriously recycled Warner's own big screen scripts, and it was an unabashed part of their TV show production formula. Usually though, they did a much better job of finessing and concealing the re-write than this half-baked, paint-by-numbers Cliff Notes version of a first-rate movie. Edward Andrews was a decent TV actor, but he's unintentionally comical impersonating Humphrey Bogart's memorable "Fred C. Dobbs". Rod Taylor listlessly goes through the motions in the Tim Holt role, and Clint Walker, as the affably heroic Cheyenne, is simply a foil here, and hardly a substitute for Walter Huston's amazing Treasure of Sierra Madre performance. The actors looked self-conscious and embarrassed by this assignment, and rightly so.

I'm a big fan of the Cheyenne series, particularly the first season, and the show regularly offered superior scripting and rousing entertainment. Cheyenne moseyed down the wrong trail for "The Argonauts" though, which is a particularly painful-to-watch small screen adaptation of a peerless classic.