Gunsmoke (TV series)

Gunsmoke

Title card of Gunsmoke's radio version (title card of 1954)
Genre	Western
Running time	30 minutes
Country	United States
Language(s)	English
TV adaptations	Gunsmoke
Starring	William Conrad Parley Baer Howard McNear Georgia Ellis
Created by	Norman Macdonnell John Meston
Produced by	Norman Macdonnell
Air dates	April 26, 1952 to June 18, 1961
No. of series	9
No. of episodes	432
Audio format	Monaural

Gunsmoke
Gunsmoke title card
Based on	Gunsmoke created by John Meston Norman Macdonnell
Developed by	Charles Marquis Warren
Starring	James Arness Milburn Stone Amanda Blake Dennis Weaver Burt Reynolds Ken Curtis Roger Ewing Buck Taylor
Theme music composer	Rex Koury Glenn Spencer
Country of origin	United States
No. of seasons	6 ('Marshal Dillon', syndication retitling of half-hour episodes) 14 ('Gunsmoke'), 20 (total seasons)
No. of episodes	233 ('Marshal Dillon', syndication retitling of half-hour episodes), 402 ('Gunsmoke') 635 (total episodes) (list of episodes)
Production
Running time	26 minutes (1955 – 1961), 50 minutes (1961 – 1975)
Production company(s)	CBS Productions Filmaster Productions Arness and Company (1959 – 1961) The Arness Production Company (1961 – '64)
Distributor	CBS Television Distribution
Release
Original network	CBS
Picture format	Black and white (1955 – 1966) Color (1966 – 1975)
Original release	September 10, 1955 – March 31, 1975

Gunsmoke is an American radio and television Western drama series created by director Norman Macdonnell and writer John Meston. The stories take place in and around Dodge City, Kansas, during the settlement of the American West. The central character is lawman Marshal Matt Dillon, played by William Conrad on radio and James Arness on television. When aired in the UK, the television series was initially titled Gun Law, later reverting to Gunsmoke.

The radio series ran from 1952 to 1961. John Dunning wrote that among radio drama enthusiasts, "Gunsmoke is routinely placed among the best shows of any kind and any time." The television series ran for 20 seasons from 1955 to 1975, and lasted for 635 episodes. At the end of its run in 1975, Los Angeles Times columnist Cecil Smith wrote: "Gunsmoke was the dramatization of the American epic legend of the west. Our own Iliad and Odyssey, created from standard elements of the dime novel and the pulp western as romanticized by [Ned] Buntline, [Bret] Harte, and [Mark] Twain. It was ever the stuff of legend."

In the late 1940s, CBS chairman William S. Paley, a fan of the Philip Marlowe radio serial, asked his programming chief, Hubell Robinson, to develop a hardboiled Western series, a show about a "Philip Marlowe of the Old West". Robinson instructed his West Coast CBS Vice President, Harry Ackerman, who had developed the Philip Marlowe series, to take on the task.

Ackerman and his scriptwriters, Mort Fine and David Friedkin, created an audition script called "Mark Dillon Goes to Gouge Eye" based on one of their Michael Shayne radio scripts, "The Crooked Wheel". Two auditions were created in 1949. The first was very much like a hardboiled detective series and starred Michael Rye (credited as Rye Billsbury) as Dillon; the second starred Straight Arrow actor Howard Culver in a more Western, lighter version of the same script. CBS liked the Culver version better, and Ackerman was told to proceed.