My New Favorite Show

This is kind of a joke, since I don't really watch all that much television. If there was a new show that if I'm not at work when the episodes air, I'll stop and watch them, would be ABC's Modern Family.

This post is about a show that comes on only when I'm off (it's on later than when I leave for work), and recently I've had it on while working on this blog. Occasionally on my days off, I'll go ride on my bike, come back to my apartment and write, and later on, head back out on my bike after a cocktail. Sometimes I'll put on a movie while I write for timing purposes. Once I let this show play out, just so I could see what the fuss was about. It turned out to be better than I expected.

I shouldn't have been surprised, since it's the longest running live action show in American history, Gunsmoke.

I wouldn't say I'm a western freak, but I am a fan to some degree. To highlight my point, an episode of Gunsmoke aired where James Arness' Marshall Matt Dillon, after being shot, is mended by a family of former slaves heading to Oregon. The family is menaced by the same shooters of our hero, the Marshall, and are foiled eventually through the ingenuity of the family and the ailing hero. It was an interesting discussion on race relations, and the first time I ever heard the phrase "leather-ear": it's an escaped slave who was caught and shorn of an ear as punishment. Said caught slave would wear a leather patch, like an eye-patch, over their ear.

The next show on the channel I caught the first five minutes of, is also a western, and after those first five minutes, I decided I couldn't stomach it any longer. It was an episode of Bonanza, and the Michael Landon's character was vying for a girl's attention in competition with his friend. In five minutes it was tired and done over.

That's the point I was trying to make about westerns. I like some, absolutely, but others I don't care for. As a genre, the western offers me the possibility of enjoyment, is all I'm saying. I know people who can't stand westerns.

In any case, I've only seen three episodes of Gunsmoke to date, of 400+ over twenty years, so some may not be as good as others. The first episode I saw was about swindlers and land speculation. The second episode was about Doc, the town doctor, witnessing a murder in the opening moments of the show, calling out for someone to stop the murderer, that murderer getting shot by Marshall Dillon while fleeing, then the doctor having to tend to him. Meanwhile, a sick baby, who had no real chance of survival, died because Doc, who'd been on his way to help the baby only to witness the stabbing, had to tend to the accused stabber.

The storylines are tragic and real and complex. It's not The Wire, but really, what is? For a western from the late fifties spanning all the way to the seventies, I realized why it had staying power: good writing.