Ted Gioia illustrates the mind-blowing dominance of westerns on TV and in the theatre in the 1950s and how quickly the boom was over and has never come close to recovering:
Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-rated_United_States_television_programs_of_1958%E2%80%9359
Eight of the top ten shows during the 1958-59 season were westerns.
Spaceships were in the news every day back then, but on TV it was just horses — and occasionally a covered wagon. Each of the three networks was caught up in a time warp, partying like it was 1899.
Any fool could see that they were saturating the market. Yet the studios kept launching new westerns with regularity, although with less confidence, for another decade, more or less.
Back in 1955, the three US TV networks had introduced three new western-themed series — Gunsmoke, Cheyenne, and Wyatt Earp. But two years later, the networks ramped up their investment in cowboys, launching nine new westerns that fall.
And it got worse.
In 1958, these three networks introduced ten more western series. On some nights, you could watch cowboys for two hours straight on ABC. CBS and NBC also started scheduling back-to-back Wild West shows.
I need to stress that the western was already an exhausted genre long before 1960. Movie theaters had relied on cowboys as an audience draw going back at least to Broncho Billy Anderson and The Great Train Robbery (1903).
And cheap books and magazines with stories of the Wild West had already been around for decades at that point. By my measure, nostalgia for the old West dates back to the launch of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show on May 19, 1883 in Omaha, Nebraska — four years after the invention of the gasoline engine.
Poster for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show — the first major cowboy nostalgia business
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Younger viewers were the first to abandon the western — a telling sign, especially when you consider that, back in the 1930s, children and teens had been the core audience for the genre.
By the time Gunsmoke went off the air in 1975, the few remaining fans were old-timers — maybe the same ones who had gone to movie theaters to cheer for Roy Rogers in the 1930s. That show had been the most popular TV series in the US for four seasons in the late 1950s. But a cowboy series would never do that again.
Youngsters lost interest in westerns despite a proliferation of merchandise. During my childhood, I paid no attention to the cowboy genre — nor did any of my friends. But brand merchandise was everywhere. We could buy Gunsmoke comic books, trading cards, lunchboxes, and — of course! — toy guns, among other paraphernalia.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that these products did not develop the market — they merely saturated it.
