What I Learned from Binge-Watching Cowboy Movies

I hated cowboys when I was a youngster. Not real cowboys—I never met a single gunslinger, cowpoke, or desperado in in my urban neighborhood. My loathing was reserved for cowboys on TV.

And they were everywhere.

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At one point, eight of the top ten shows on the flickering tube were westerns. And it got worse from there—Hollywood kept churning out more and more cowboy movies and TV series. I tried to avoid them, as did many of my buddies, but it was like dodging bullets in Dodge. There was nowhere to hide.

That’s because our parents loved these simple stories of frontier justice. They couldn’t get enough of them. And when they weren’t watching them on TV, they dragged us off to movie theaters to see The Magnificent Seven (128 minutes) The Alamo (138 minutes) or How the West Was Won (an excruciating 164 minutes).

My friends and I preferred different genres. We vibed with spies like James Bond or astronauts or pirates or private investigators.

Anything except cowboys.

But we fought a losing battle. When we changed the channel to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. on NBC, the old folks would turn it back to Gunsmoke on CBS. We dug Star Trek. They felt more at home with Bonanza.

The battle raged for years. And then it was all over.

By the time I became a teenager, the cowboy was an endangered species in Hollywood. Demand for western movies and TV series collapsed. And I celebrated as all these rustlers and ranchers and rustics road off into the sunset for the last time.

After 14 seasons, Bonanza was canceled. After 21 seasons, Gunsmoke smoked no more. Rawhide went into hiding, except for the theme song (appropriated by the Blues Brothers).

And I never thought about it again. Until recently.

Now, years later, I started wondering about the western genre. What made this such a powerful myth for my parents’ generation? Why did it die? Could it ever rise again?

Or does it matter at all? Should we just put all those cowboy stories behind us, and move cheerily into the future?

That’s why I started watching western movies recently. At first I did so sporadically, to fill an idle hour. And then I ramped up