High in the Saddle

Shotgun in hand, six-shooters at his sides, Wyatt Earp (rhymes with burp) rode coolly this week into a Dodge City dirt street crackling with the bullets of the Old West's 30 top gunmen, hired as killers by two feuding stagecoach lines. He rode on the highest saddle in TV--third place (after the Ed Sullivan Show and / Love Lucy) in the latest Trendex popularity ratings for all U.S. network television.

Earp, who used a ruse and one burst of buckshot to disarm all 30 ruffians, symbolizes not only the gunfighting marshals who tamed the wild frontier but a pack of horse operas that thunder in growing numbers down the channels of TV. The three networks like this season's 16 Western series so well that they have already scheduled twelve more for next fall--the biggest visible trend for the new season--and independents are hopefully breaking in 50 other contenders. Among the forthcoming shows: CBS's Have Gun, Will Travel, ABC's The Texan, The Californians, Oklahoma Kid, NBC's The Wagon Train, Pony Express. ABC's half-hour Lije and Legend of Wyatt Earp (8:30 p.m.) is at the center of a solid two-hour Western bloc that enables the network to dominate Tuesday evening viewing.

For Adults. In the current rage, the old horse opera has been fitted with a new handle: the "adult Western." And there are signs that the old genre has come of age. Items: Hugh O'Brian, who plays Earp, and Jim Arness, star of CBS's highly rated Gunsmoke, have been named as Emmy candidates for "best actor in a continuing series" by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences--the kind of distinction that hard-riding Tom Mix and Buck Jones never overtook. In movies the adult Western goes back at least as far as John Ford's Stagecoach. On the air it owes its start to the radio version of Gunsmoke, which began in 1952. Some adult

Westerns, including occasional installments of Earp, manage to be puerile, but they try to buttress the ancient shootin' ridin' formula with realism, characterization, historical trappings.

"We never do action for action's sake," says Gunsmoke Producer Norman Macdonnell. "For instance, we've never had a chase on Gunsmoke. We made a list of things that annoyed us in the regular Westerns. For instance, the devotion of the cowboy to his horse. That's a lot of nonsense. The two things a cowboy loves best are his saddle and his hat. And cowboy speech isn't full of things like 'shucks' and 'side-winding varmint.' What's more, the frontier marshals made mistakes sometimes, and they weren't always pure. The other week's show is a typical example. Matt Dillon [the hero] kills four guys and then is ashamed of himself."

For Children. Says Wyatt Earp Producer Robert Sisk: "Earp gets slapped down occasionally. He's a very human person." As its bible for Frederick Hazlitt Brerinan's scripts, the Earp show uses Stuart N. Lake's biography, whose critics may have nicked it (said one: "Fictionalized glorification of a tinhorn outlaw") but have riot killed it as a major sourcebook for Westerns since 1931. Says Sisk: "We've got to slice the truth pretty close to make it last, but we stick closely to the biographical details."

As portrayed by Actor O'Brian, 31, onetime Marine drill instructor, Wyatt Earp now rides herd on the youngsters, makes them eat their cereal (Cheerios) and brush their teeth (with Gleem). His impeccable dress--frock coat, striped pants, silk vest, black sombrero--is a good example for the junior blue-jeans set ("Mothers love me"). Western buffs approve of his resemblance to the real Earp (though he omits the handlebar mustache) and his ability to handle such firearms as Earp's long-barreled Buntline Special with authentic eelan--he is perhaps the only regular Western type on TV who aims his gun before firing. And O'Brian's good looks make the show so popular with women that Procter & Gamble, one of his sponsors, is happily planning to add a commercial for a ladies' shampoo.

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