Star Wars isn’t a distortion of history. I mean, as far as we know.
But you miss my point - it’s true that people don’t want fact-based entertainment, but they don’t want blatant lie-based entertainment, either. That means they want neither realistic westerns nor mythic westerns.
Like mob films? Drunk dude films? Tarantino and Stone films? Titanic and fantasy?
You dont want it doesnt mean that others dont want it.
Pretty much the same in the '50s, except replace one of those with ‘Westerns’. (I’m guessing, because I didn’t exist in the '50s; just going on what Ive seen being rebroadcast.) In the '70s you had a lot of detective and police shows (Hawaii Five-O, Ironside, Canon, The Rockford Files, and so on). Late-'70s and early-'80s there were science fiction series. In the late-'80s and '90s there were westerns. I liked The Young Riders. There was Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., Lonesome Dove, and others.
TV is cyclical. Just wait for the next audience who wants to see Westerns.
There were so many Westerns during the genre’s heyday, it makes me wonder if the genre’s just played out. Or at least all the low-hanging fruit has already been picked (in terms of stories you can tell in a Western setting, etc.).
Why were they watching dreck like Dr Quinn back in the '90s? 
I don’t think lack of reality turns people off to westerns, it’s just not that popular of a subject anymore. Through the 20th century it was a cultural phenomenon based on our country’s recent history of settlement. It’s not that interesting anymore, at least in the context of the old west, mythical or real. But the basic plot lines and characters haven’t really changed. Detective stories, sci-fi, thrillers, they’re all using those same themes. Star Wars has been called a Space Western from the beginning. Audiences may want to return to the old west some day, but they’ll keep watching the good guys vs. the bad guys in one form or another.
It’s going to be slightly harder to make a serious western credible after Eastwood deconstructed the tropes in Unforgiven. At least until people forget about Unforgiven.
Most people? I don’t know if I would go that far at all. The attitudes you describe can, perhaps, be accurately attributed to youngish urban liberals. Quite a lot of people do not match that description.
But then again, this is The Dope where everything that isn’t about racism is about rape, except when it is about both.
That was a full generation ago.
I haven’t seen either show, and was just judging based on the one-sentence descriptions. But don’t worry, I’m not a Nielsen family, so my horribly uninformed judgement has no consequences.
Isn’t that true of all genres? Do you think NCIS is anything like the lives of real federal agents?
Who are the people who make TV shows and movies.
Really? Are there really enough people in the “demo” who think that the Old West was a cool, romantic period? Because I’m not sure that’s the case. I suspect most of them think it’s lame at best, actively offensive at worse.
Personally, I love westerns. I love modern-day westerns (Justified), space westerns (Firefly), and westerns in alternate fantasy dimensions (the Dark Tower books). I just don’t love the Old West. It’s very… brown.
I appreciate all the responses, especially those that made me aware of western-themed shows that actually are being made. In turn, I’d like to correct a misimpression that some seem to have about the old Westerns with regard to racism.
Of course it was there. You had sidekicks like Tonto, and flunkies like Hop Sing (Bonanza) and Hey Boy (Paladin), and in the movies especially, you often had Indians attacking whites just as a given, without much attempt to give their POV of whites violating the treaties or destroying their herds or fencing off their land or whatever.
But for whatever reason, and at least in the series I have access to, the TV Westerns of the late 50’s and early 60’s were fairly enlightened, i.e. the Indians were very often shown in a sympathetic light, with the good white guys usually being their friends and/or allies, and most of the people who hated Indians just because they were Indians being depicted as stupid oafs at best, and very often as criminals who were trying to blame the Indians for their own misdeeds.
I heard a story on Marketplace about Disney’s Frontierland attractions being replaced by Star Wars-themed rides. This part of the story speaks to the wane of Westerns in popular culture:
Before I existed, Disneyland had ‘Rainbow Ridge Pack Mules’, where you’d ride actual mules. Apparently from 1960 to 1973 they had ‘Pack Mules Through Nature’s Wonderland’, but I don’t remember it.
I guess I’m just a product of my childhood. I grew up in a small town in the wide open spaces, complete with rolling hills and sagebrush, and the earliest TV shows I remember were the Westerns of the early 60’s, including reruns of shows from the late 50’s. I must have been imprinted.
Sure, but that’s true of any time period you choose to name if you aren’t concentrating on the parts that aren’t drab, ugly and filled with smelly, racist people.
Westerns have a sort of unique appeal- there’s room for a lot of stories, with the historical record being vague in various times and places during the “Old West” period, and there are plenty of historical examples of legendary heroic characters, even if the truth isn’t quite so heroic or legendary (like say… Wyatt Earp).
You can’t write something nearly so legendary or romantic based on suburban characters in Tombstone, AZ nowadays without having them be some sort of cop or military person, or by introducing something extraordinary like aliens or a foreign invasion or something. There’s nothing romantic or legendary about “Cecil the Manager of Accounts Receivable who shot down the unfound expense in cold blood at month-end” or about “Dale the Suburbanite vs. the hog snake in the backyard”
I have a feeling that this kind of thing will turn out to be somewhat cyclical; Westerns may have a resurgence once all the people who were brought up watching Gunsmoke and “Have Gun Will Travel” and all the Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns are dead, and writers are looking for something “new”.
Anything’s possible with culture, but I can’t think of any genre or type of programming that’s come back after being as dead as westerns have been.
My hunch is that westerns worked at first because they were the equivalent of today’s mindless action movies. Few things in everyday life had as much potential for conflict as cowboys vs Indians, cowboys vs. bad men, cowboys vs. animals, cowboys vs. nature. Horses were to that world what cars are to ours; familiar, maybe even humdrum, yet capable of wild excitement in extreme conditions.
Movies loved westerns because they were cheap to shoot. Go a few miles out from Hollywood and you had the right scenery. They were cheap to write as well. Nobody asked for cleverness; the same few plot situations satisfied. That’s why TV producers loved them as well. After a few decades of hammering home the same cliches the audience accepted all the nonsense about guns with infinite bullets and horses that fell on command. Accuracy about the past wasn’t an issue. Watch an episode of Bonanza. The sets are immaculate. Everybody is clean. Their clothing is perfect. Not a single moment remotely resembles any reality of any time in history.
Hollywood tried to make more adult westerns in the 50s, but most people didn’t want reality and complexity in their westerns. But they also got bored by the repetition of old plots and situations. Horses and rural scenes no longer meant either familiarity or exotic interest, even in more rural areas, always big supporters of westerns. Urban life started to resonate more. That could be as ridiculously cliched as westerns, but more people cared about those cliches. (Star Trek was sold as Wagon Train in space.) Action began to mean car chases instead of horse chases. Horses were inherently limited; cars could appear anywhere and everywhere.
Cars still symbolize action, and freedom, and adventure, and movement, and danger, and all the other good stuff that people like in their entertainment. And they’re omnipresent while horses are essentially invisible. Westerns won’t make a comeback until horses do.
Besides, Native Americans have finally gotten organized about protesting their depiction in media. Westerns will have to become realistic about their treatment, and that can’t be mass entertainment. Once you associate the west with genocide there’s no turning back in mass culture.
That’s probably the best explanation for the dearth of Westerns in the early 21st century: creative exhaustion. Atter 100 years of countless dime novels, movies, and TV shows, people just got bored with the genre. Also, during much of the time Westerns were popular, there were still people who lived during the latter half of the 19th century. Once those people were gone, a connection was lost. The era of the Old West now seemed as distant as Renaissance Italy.
I’m sure there are many reasons why there aren’t many westerns on TV these days, but even if they started to make a comeback, I don’t think they’d ever come close to filling the airwaves the way they did in the early days of television.
In fact, I don’t think any genre can come close to the dominance that westerns had on American TV in 1959-60 prime time schedule. In that season alone there were 31 westerns on the schedule!
ABC had 13:
Colt .45
Broken Arrow
Maverick
The Lawmen
The Rebel
The Alaskans
Cheyenne
Sugarfoot
Bronco
The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp
The Rifleman
The Man from Blackhawk
Black Saddle
NBC had 10:
Riverboat
Overland Trail
Tales of Wells Fargo
Laramie
Wagon Train
Wichita Town
Law of the Plainsman
Bat Masterson
Bonanza
The Deputy
CBS had 8:
The Texan
Johnny Ringo
Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theater
Rawhide
Hotel de Paree
Wanted Dead or Alive
Have Gun - Will Travel
Gunsmoke