‘Gunsmoke’ aired from 1955 to 1974 and set a new standard for TV drama Tereza Shkurtaj is a writer-reporter at PEOPLE. She has been working for PEOPLE since 2025. Her work has previously appeared in ...

Seventy years ago, on September 10, 1955, a gunfighter named Matt Dillon first strode into Dodge City on CBS, Gunsmoke, helping to change the nature of TV Westerns, eventually running for 20 years, ...

When the classic western drama “Gunsmoke” finished its 20-year run on CBS in 1975, Los Angeles Times critic Cecil Smith made a bold prediction. “I have the feeling that the first moon colony we ...

Offscreen, James Arness traded Dodge City’s saloon dust for the comfort of his own king-size bed. Photographed in 1956, the towering Gunsmoke star relaxes with a script for an upcoming episode, ...

According to John Peel’s book, The Gunsmoke Years, the show encountered viewership issues ahead of the decision to cancel it. However, that’s why the decision was made to fire producer Norman ...

A close-up of John Wayne in his cowboy getup in the first episode of 'Gunsmoke' titled "Matt Gets It" Image via CBS If you're at all familiar with television Westerns, then you'd undoubtedly have ...

Few shows have run on network television for as long as Gunsmoke ran on CBS. For twenty years, the Western series braved television sets after first jumping from a radio drama to the screen, and later ...

This summer, as the Black Lives Matter protests overlapped with “safer at home” practices, I slipped into binge-watching the old TV western, “Gunsmoke” — in particular, the pioneer episodes of the ...