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Gunsmoke (TV series)

Gunsmoke
Gunsmoke22.jpg
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 screen).jpg
Gunsmoke title card
Based on Gunsmoke created by
John Meston
Norman Macdonnell
Developed by Charles Marquis Warren
Starring
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.


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