Gunsmoke
In the late 1940s, CBS chairman William S. Paley, a fan of the Philip Marlowe radio series, asked his programming chief, Hubell Robinson, to develop a hardboiled Western series, a show about a “Philip Marlowe of the Old West”. Robinson instructed his West Coast CBS Vice President, Harry Ackerman, who had developed the Philip Marlowe series, to take on the task.Ackerman and his scriptwriters, Mort Fine and David Friedkin, created an audition script called “Mark Dillon Goes to Gouge Eye” based on one of their Michael Shayne radio scripts, “The Case of the Crooked Wheel” from the summer of 1948. Two versions were recorded. The first, recorded in June 1949, was very much like a hardboiled detective series and starred Michael Rye (credited as Rye Billsbury) as Dillon; the second, recorded in July 1949, starred Straight Arrow actor Howard Culver in a more Western, lighter version of the same script. CBS liked the Culver version better, and Ackerman was told to proceed.A complication arose, though; Culver’s contract as the star of Straight Arrow would not allow him to do another Western series. The project was shelved for three years when producer Norman Macdonnell and writer John Meston discovered it while creating an adult Western series of their own.Macdonnell and Meston wanted to create a radio Western for adults, in contrast to the prevailing juvenile fare such as The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid. Gunsmoke was set in Dodge City, Kansas, during the thriving cattle days of the 1870s. Dunning notes, “The show drew critical acclaim for unprecedented realism.”Radio cast and character biographiesThe radio series first aired on CBS on April 26, 1952, with the episode “Billy the Kid”, written by Walter Newman, and ended on June 18, 1961. The show stars William Conrad as Marshal Matt Dillon, Howard McNear as Doc Charles Adams, Georgia Ellis as Kitty Russell, and Parley Baer as Dillon’s assistant, Chester Wesley Proudfoot. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Copyright details · more info
Artwork and data is from the podcast’s open RSS feed; we link directly to audio · Read our DMCA procedure
This podcast may use tracking and attribution and dynamic content insertion
Stats: Statistics are produced by Spotify to help Gunsmoke to understand how many downloads it is getting, or how many people are listening. Your device’s IP address and user agent is used to help calculate this figure. Here is more detail about podcast statistics.
Tracking and attribution: Spotify or its partners may connect the fact you listened to this podcast to an action elsewhere on the internet. For example - it may spot a device that downloaded an episode of Gunsmoke later visited the website of an advertiser; or it may track that a device that listened to Gunsmoke also listened to a different show. This form of attribution is used to measure advertising effectiveness.
Dynamic content insertion: Spotify may use limited data that they know about you - the device you’re using, the approximate location you’re in, or other data that can be derived from this, like the current weather forecast for your area - to change parts of the audio. Gunsmoke may do this for advertising or for other forms of content, like news stories.
This is hosted by Spotify: this may mean that Spotify require you to log in to listen, and from that, they will know considerably more about you, including your email address and potentially a connection with your Facebook account and data.
Gunsmoke is able to use the above tools since its podcast host or measurement company offers this service. It doesn’t mean that this individual podcast uses them, or has access to this functionality. We use open data.
Listen and follow
Information for podcasters
- This podcast appears to be only available on Spotify. If that is the case, then the podcaster could get significant extra listens by submitting this show on Apple Podcasts.