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The Talking Horse. Behind the hand that holds the gun is, of course, the hand that strokes the typewriter, and television scriptwriters are frantically trying to find new packages for one of the oldest staples on the shelves of U.S. show business. The new horse operas are generically known as Adult Westerns, a term first used to describe the shambling, down-to-biscuits realism of Gunsmoke, but there are numerous subspecies. First came the Psychological Western, which populated the arroyos with schizophrenic half-breeds, paranoid bluecoats, amnesic prospectors. Then there was the Civil Rights Western, and all the persecuted Piutes, molested Mexicans, downtrodden Jewish drummers and tormented Chinese laundrymen had their day. Scriptwriters are now riding farther from the train, rustling plots (from De Maupassant, Stevenson, even Aristophanes), introducing foreigners (an Italian tailor on Zane Grey Theater, a samurai on Wagon Train) and dabbling in rape, incest, miscegenation, cannibalism.
Good or bad, adult or infantile, psychological or just physical, the TV western is the No. 1 talking horse of the average trail-feverish American. A man in Pennsylvania, angered when his wife turned off Have Gun, Will Travel while he was watching it, ran for his revolver and took a shot at her. (He missed.) In Florida one priest bet another that Marshal Matt Dillon was faster on the draw than Paladin—loser to say early Mass on Sunday. Tie-in sales of toys suggested by TV westerns are expected to hit $125 million this year. And at last count, the U.S. had about 600 "fast-draw clubs."
American Odyssey. Why has the television western far surpassed the popularity of its previous incarnations in the dime novel, the tent show, the wide screen? Why has it overtaken the space cowboys, the precinct operas and the llama dramas? Says ABC Program Director Thomas W. Moore: "The western is just the neatest and quickest type of escape entertainment, that's all." But few are willing to let it go at that. Parents and professional worriers are concerned about the violence and sadism in the horse opera. Psychoanalysts are looking for sex symbols (all those guns, of course), Oedipal patterns (to kill the wicked sheriff really means to kill Pop), indirect aggressions ("Women are apt to think of their husbands in the villain's role," says one Payne Whitney staffer).