The TV Western Rides Again

“Lonesome Dove” is not so lonesome anymore.

CBS’ meandering miniseries about the Old West didn’t fare as well as some people had expected at the Emmy Awards Sunday night, but its success in February as the highest-rated miniseries in five years is being credited with helping to revive interest in a long-dormant TV genre: the Western.

ABC gets into the act tonight with a series about the Pony Express, “The Young Riders.” “Paradise,” the story of a gunslinger (Lee Horsley) who reluctantly inherits his sister’s children, is back for a second season on CBS despite marginal ratings, and NBC, for the third year, will have several new installments of its “Desperado” TV movies, based on short stories by Elmore Leonard.

On cable, meanwhile, the Family Channel earlier this year introduced “Bordertown,” about life in a mudhole town that straddles the U.S.-Canadian border--becoming part of a lineup that includes reruns of “Gunsmoke,” “Wagon Train,” “The Big Valley, “The Rifleman” and “Roy Rogers,” as well as a collection of “lost episodes” of “Bonanza” that never aired in syndication after the show went off the air in 1971.

While producers of the new Westerns all say they came up with their ideas before “Lonesome Dove,” they acknowledge that the miniseries, as well as the popularity of the feature films “Silverado” and “Young Guns,” gave them a boost.

Westerns were once the primary dramatic form on television. But long ago they were supplanted by police and detective shows, which played out the same basic good guy-bad guy stories but in a contemporary, urban setting that was found to attract what advertisers considered a more demographically appealing audience.

More recently, says David Gerber, president of MGM/UA Television Productions, which produces “Young Riders,” the Western morality tale has taken the form of the “Western in the skies”--the high-tech space movie. That genre, however, appealed mainly to young viewers; Gerber hopes that older viewers will join the young in watching “Young Riders” because of their nostalgia for the Western.

He added, however, that a new Western can’t survive without including some of the state-of-the-art cinematography and music common to more contemporary shows. “Rob Lieberman, who (directed) the pilot, has done some commercials that are very popular today. We’re using a different kind of texture, using more long lenses, a kind of filter dust, hand-held cameras--we’re trying to get a certain kind of temperature going.”

Gerber has been down this revival trail before. In 1976, he produced a series called “The Quest,” the story of two young brothers (Kurt Russell and Tim Matheson) in search of a long-lost sister captured by the Cheyenne Indians. It only lasted a few months.

Gerber believes that audiences defected from the show not only to tune in the competition, “Charlie’s Angels,” but also because they were not ready for the dark realism “The Quest” introduced to the genre.

“We did the mean streets of the West,” he said. “We showed Chinese laborers being shot down in the streets; we showed black soldiers being chased into Mexico. . . . Gosh, I wish I had taped it.”

Nevertheless, “The Young Riders” is trying for an even starker reality, according to Jonas McCord, one of the executive producers of the series, along with Michael Ogiens and Josh Kane. He compared the danger faced by the Pony Express riders to the experience of young soldiers in Vietnam.

“The Pony Express riders were 18 and 19, and there was nothing out there for them but killing and terror,” McCord said. “It was just like it was for an 18- or 19-year-old dropped from a helicopter into Saigon.”

McCord said that “The Young Riders” is aiming for the type of personal stories told in “Lonesome Dove” rather than the action-adventure appeal of a film such as “Young Guns.” He sees audience interest in the small struggles of the cowboy as a reaction against the non-specific murder and mayhem in films such as “Rambo.”

“A real hero is not somebody who sits on top of a moving tank and kills 30 people racing at him,” McCord said. “A hero is someone who knows the terror, but still does what he has to do. The ‘Rambo’ character is not as heroic as the character who gives a man his word, and crosses the country and faces death just because he has given his word.”

Paul Krimsier, vice president of programs and promotion for the Family Channel, said that, while new Westerns such as “Bordertown” create more realism than in the past (“Did you ever see Ben Cartwright get dirty?”), they allow viewers to experience it in a world comfortably far away from their own.

“If you watch a show that is very contemporary, and has the intensity of, say, a ‘Miami Vice,’ you have a more realistic opportunity of something like that happening in your own life,” Krimsier said. “You aren’t going to walk in on an old Western shoot-out. It’s not challenging or frightening. Plus, we have always had success with Westerns because they are family shows.”

There is a strong family element to CBS’ “Paradise” as well--the result, says creator and executive producer David Jacobs, of his having been working simultaneously on developing a miniseries about the Old West and a show “about someone who had parenthood thrust upon him.” He credited CBS Entertainment President Kim LeMasters with suggesting merging the two.

Jacobs, who also created “Dallas” and is the executive producer of “Knots Landing,” welcomes the change of “Paradise.”

“I love ‘Knots Landing’ dearly, but I didn’t want to do another one of those, and frankly I don’t need the money,” he said. “I wanted something that my kids could get involved in. I feel very comfortable on ‘Paradise’ dealing with moral dilemmas. Nobody on ‘Paradise’ would say something like ‘Greed is OK’--they’d be run out of town.”

Besides more dust, there are other differences between today’s Westerns and those of years past.

Producer McCord of “The Young Riders” says that yesterday’s Westerns were not allowed to reveal the cowboy’s frailty: “Their pants were always pressed. Now, I can show the pain in a hero. I never could have taken Wyatt Earp and shown him hurting because he killed a man.”

Perhaps the biggest change, he said, is in the depiction of the American Indian. The networks, he explained, no longer tolerate the kind of stereotyping that was rife in the old Westerns.

“ABC has an American Indian in its standards and practices department,” McCord said. “You can’t screw around with that stuff anymore; you can’t twist history anymore. I can’t cast somebody who’s not an Indian as an Indian.”