How Sam Peck­in­pah trans­formed the TV western

In 1960, as the TV west­ern was on the way out, Sam Peck­in­pah was on the way in. After near­ly a decade work­ing in tele­vi­sion for oth­er peo­ple, he was grow­ing increas­ing­ly frus­trat­ed with the fam­i­ly-ori­ent­ed fan­tasies that had come to dom­i­nate the view­ing sched­ule. So he decid­ed to go it alone, con­ceiv­ing a show which, despite run­ning for just 13 episodes, had a pro­found impact on both the genre and Peckinpah’s career.

Lead­ing up to The West­ern­er, Peck­in­pah worked on a show called The Rifle­man. After the cen­sors reject­ed one of his scripts for Gun­smoke, he reworked it and sold it as a pilot. The first sea­son went well, and he was hap­py with the prod­uct, but he soon brushed up against oth­er pro­duc­ers. Peck­in­pah want­ed to con­tin­ue to devel­op the char­ac­ter Mark McK­ain (played by John­ny Craw­ford), the naïve son of the pro­tag­o­nist. He envi­sioned the show being the sto­ry of a boy grow­ing into man­hood. But, as The Rifle­man com­pet­ed as one of the high­est-rat­ed TV shows, the net­work want­ed to keep things fam­i­ly-friend­ly and reject­ed his idea.

Frus­trat­ed, Peck­in­pah moved on to a new project that even­tu­al­ly became The West­ern­er. Inspired by his own expe­ri­ences grow­ing up, he was keen to avoid the cliché of the hero­ic sharp­shoot­er, instead cen­tring his west­ern on a cow­boy drifter. While shows like Gun­smoke and The Rifle­man ush­ered in a new kind of TV west­ern that had a cer­tain lev­el of sophis­ti­ca­tion, they remained caught up in the illu­sions and myths of moral abso­lutism. TV west­erns at the time tend­ed to depict clash­es between sav­agery and civil­i­sa­tion; accord­ing to Jean-Fran­cois Rauger’s essay ​‘Wild West, Domes­tic Gaze: Sam Peck­in­pah and Tele­vi­sion’, Peck­in­pah was more inter­est­ed in ​“the per­ma­nent sav­agery in the heart of civil­i­sa­tion itself.”

The pilot of The West­ern­er, imme­di­ate­ly announces itself as some­thing dif­fer­ent. Dirty and smoky, Peck­in­pah insist­ed the set and cos­tume design showed the wear and tear of the fron­tier. In stark black-and-white, we see Dave Blasingame (Bri­an Kei­th), with his loy­al dog, Brown, on the hori­zon. Blasingame is rid­ing into town in search of sal­va­tion and res­cu­ing his long-lost love.

Her name is Jeff (Diana Mil­lay), a bar­maid who is under the thumb of a bru­tal pimp-saloon own­er and for­mer pro­fes­sion­al box­er. In an inti­mate close-up, her eyes swell with fear before she’s pushed into the arms of a vio­lent and lech­er­ous cus­tomer. Mas­cara runs down her face, per­ma­nent­ly smeared with dirt. The vio­lence feels bru­tal and threat­en­ing even by today’s standards.

Blasingame isn’t a par­tic­u­lar­ly good shoot­er or fight­er; he gets roughed up bad­ly and can only win a fight by cheat­ing. His loy­al com­pan­ion is more inter­est­ed in food than guard­ing, and for all his efforts, the object of his affec­tion choos­es to stay with her abuser. Heart­bro­ken rather than angry, he drifts back out of town beat­en-up, his efforts ulti­mate­ly pointless.

In con­trast with pre­vi­ous TV west­erns, the vio­lence in The West­ern­er felt raw – even unwel­come. Unlike the movies, TV glowed right into people’s liv­ing rooms, and it seems they weren’t ready to be con­front­ed with the harsh real­i­ties that Peck­in­pah yearned to expose. Accord­ing to ​‘If They Move … Kill ​’Em!: The Life and Times of Sam Peck­in­pah’, ​“Tele­vi­sion audi­ences had, quite sim­ply, nev­er seen any­thing like it before: a pro­gram that focused week after week on pros­ti­tu­tion, rape, adul­tery, gris­ly mur­der; on a ​‘hero’ who fal­tered at crit­i­cal moments, made wrong deci­sions, went on drunk­en sprees, cursed, seemed a stranger to ambi­tion and held few moral con­vic­tions… a hero who wasn’t a hero at all.”

Peck­in­pah was no stranger to cen­sors, his pre­vi­ous TV work had been sani­tised and reworked for a fam­i­ly audi­ence, but it was clear that NBC was not on board with his cre­ative choic­es. Pro­grammed against two pop­u­lar new shows, The Flint­stones and Route 66, the rat­ings tanked, and after just thir­teen episodes, NBC can­celled the show.

The West­ern­er did not go qui­et­ly into the night. While some crit­ics hat­ed its sor­did­ness, oth­ers praised it. Fol­low­ing its can­cel­la­tion, let­ters poured into NBC call­ing for it to be rein­stat­ed. A group of work­ing writ­ers, includ­ing James Lee Bar­rett (Smokey and the Ban­dit) and Gene Rod­den­ber­ry (Star Trek), took out ads in The Hol­ly­wood Reporter and Vari­ety mourn­ing the show. NBC even decid­ed to revive The West­ern­er briefly as a one-hour TV Spe­cial called The Losers, star­ring Lee Mar­vin, which re-imag­ined the show in mod­ern times. It wasn’t enough to relaunch the show, although it’s notable as the first time Peck­in­pah used slow-motion.

A bold vision of Amer­i­ca stripped of roman­ti­cism, The West­ern­er deserves to be regard­ed as more than just a pre­cur­sor to Peckinpah’s film career – it rep­re­sents an impor­tant step­ping stone in Amer­i­can TV cul­ture. Its influ­ence, while hard to mea­sure, was felt in how the medi­um con­tin­ued to accel­er­ate towards what it is today. You only have to look at Quentin Tarantino’s recent Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood to gauge Peckinpah’s last­ing influence.