User Reviews

TV's Gunsmoke, to me, has three eras: the Half Hour Era, (the first 6 seasons), the Hour Black and White ERA, (seasons 7-11) and the Color Era, (seasons 12-20). The most popular era, both in the ratings and with Gunsmoke fans, is the first era. The shows were TV versions of the best episodes from the radio series. With only a half hour to tell their story, the scripts were lean and to the point. The actors were as young as their characters. And black and white seems to fit the rather dark morality plays the series specialized in. The show reached #1 in the ratings the last four years of that era. It's "classic Gunsmoke".

When they went to an hour, in the minds of a lot of fans, the stories became bloated and were written by new writers who focused less on the main characters and the quality of the show declined. This seems to be confirmed by the ratings, which declined to 3rd, 10th, 20th and eventually to 36th when the show was canceled before William Paley, the CBS chairman, ordered it put back on the schedule and, in the color era, it had a miracle comeback all the way to #2 by 1969. That makes the Hour Black and White Era the apparent nadir of the show.

I beg to differ. Part of it is that, being born in 1953, the Hour Black and White Era is the Gunsmoke I grew up with. I prefer the black and white episodes to the color ones because the color seems to emphasize the studio-bound nature of the Dodge City set and the increasing age of the actors. Also, magazine photographers have always had a saying that you use color for excitement and black and white for drama: Gunsmoke is a drama. And I like the hour episodes more than the black and whites. I don't see the stories as bloated at all. I see them as developed to their full potential. The focus on the "guest characters" opens up all kinds of dramatic possibilities. And there are actually more episodes that focus on the regular characters in greater depth than most of the the half hour episodes were able to do, (such as the upcoming "Chesterland")

"All That" is a great example of how the series actually improved during this period. It stars John Larch, who was in several Gunsmoke episodes, including the first season "Smoking out the Nolans", in which he played a prosperous rancher who wants to evict an less fortunate family from the small ranch they were leasing from him. Here Larch plays the unfortunate farmer who loses his wife to another man, his ranch to a creditor and most of the value of his livestock to a shifty agent. In half hour episode, the story might have ended there. Instead he goes to Colorado, is again a failure at prospecting but then comes up with a scheme that combines elements of Mark Twain's "The Million Pound Bank Note" and Molière's "The Imaginary Invalid". The result is a most satisfying concoction, one that could not possibly have been done in a half hour format. There are many other such episodes in this period.

So, why did the ratings decline if the stories actually got better? One reason might be that Saturday night is a mobile time period, historically a ratings dead zone where sporting events do better than dramatic TV shows and an hour show might not fit into people's schedules as well as a half hour show with a simpler plot. or maybe it was because NBC started showing recent blockbuster films on it's "Saturday Night a the Movies" in the fall of 1961 for stay-at homes. Maybe both. But it surely wasn't the fault of what was actually the new and improved hour long "Gunsmoke".

... that explores human nature and all its warts, and in particular, greed. Not the kind of greed you see in criminals who will shoot you dead if you don't hand over the money, but the kind of greed exhibited by everyday folk who would like to think of themselves as moral.

Shanks is having a hard time making his cattle ranch profitable. His alleged "friend" who leased him the land his ranch sits on evicts him from his place for non payment of rent. His wife leaves him for another "friend" because she thinks him a failure and doesn't want to follow him to Colorado. Still another "friend" buys his remaining cattle from him for half of what they are worth, and then only gives him half of that.

Shanks, picked clean by all of this fraternity and friendship, goes to Colorado to try his hand at mining. A drifter passes through, Quimby (Buddy Ebsen), they begin conversing, and Shanks comes up with a plan that can get him a ranch, cattle, and more without any physical labor and actually without breaking the law. For some reason he asks Quimby to go in for half the profit, without knowing anything about him. After he has been taken by all of his so called friends I found that odd.

So Shanks returns to Dodge City with bags and bags of "gold" (they are actually just sand"). He puts the bags into the bank's safe. He intentionally lets word spread far and wide among the townsfolk about his new found fortune. Of course this news spreads to his three former "friends" as well as his ex wife, and he lets their greed do the rest. How does their greed do the rest? Watch and find out.

Buddy Ebsen gives a great performance of the one true and probably the least carefully chosen of Shanks' friends. I'd like to think that this spot on performance helped him get the role of Jed Clampett the following year, but I don't really know. I'd highly recommend this episode of Gunsmoke.

Just dropped in to say that imo this is a GREAT story! Not only amusing and such a good showing of people's greed, but i've never seen a scenario like this before or since. If you think about it, seems especially westerns tend to "borrow" their stories from each other a LOT. i'd have enjoyed it either way but gotta admit, this episode was a true original! Ps: Shout out to kfo9494, another great review!

Schappe1 has written one of the best reviews I've seen looking at the series as a whole. I personally give the half hours the edge because they were often so dark but got to the action quickly. That said, I think the writers transitioned to an hour fairly well, and I enjoyed the addition of Burt Reynolds in, I think, season 8. The term half breed may bother some but the idea of making a mixed race individual a hero of sorts was farsighted. Some of the early hour shows are a bit bloated but it's tough to write an hour show for 30 weeks for years. One other point, I love the black and white end credit design with boot hill in the foreground. It's a connection to Matt's opening in the early years.