The Loner

The Loner
Lloyd Bridges as William Colton, 1965.
Genre	Western
Created by	Rod Serling
Starring	Lloyd Bridges
Theme music composer	Jerry Goldsmith
Composer(s)	Alexander Courage Jerry Goldsmith Nelson Riddle Fred Steiner
Country of origin	United States
Original language(s)	English
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	26 (list of episodes)
Production
Executive producer(s)	William Dozier
Producer(s)	Bruce Lansbury Andy White
Running time	30 mins.
Production company(s)	Greenway Productions, in association with Interlaken Productions and 20th Century Fox Television
Release
Original network	CBS
Picture format	Black-and-white
Original release	September 18, 1965 – April 30, 1966

The Loner is an American western series that ran for one season on CBS from 1965 to 1966, under the alternate sponsorship of Philip Morris and Procter & Gamble. The series was created by Rod Serling a year after the cancelation of The Twilight Zone. It was one of the last TV series on CBS to air in black-and-white.

The series was set in the years immediately following the American Civil War. Lloyd Bridges played the title character, William Colton, a former Union cavalry captain who headed to the American west in search of a new life. Each episode dealt with Colton's encounters with various individuals on his trek west.

Rod Serling was the series' creator. Longtime TV Guide critic Cleveland Amory wrote that Serling "obviously intended The Loner to be a realistic, adult Western," but the show's ratings indicated it was "either too real for a public grown used to the unreal Western or too adult for juvenile Easterners." Serling had expressed an open distaste for some of the television Westerns of the time in an editorial that set up the premise for "Showdown with Rance McGrew," an episode of The Twilight Zone in which a primadonna Western actor encounters the ghost of Jesse James; in that editorial, he is quoted as saying: "it seems a reasonable conjecture that if there are any television sets up in cowboy heaven and any of these rough-and-wooly nail-eaters could see with what careless abandon their names and exploits are being bandied about, they're very likely turning over in their graves - or worse, getting out of them."