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''Gunsmoke'' is an American radio and television Western drama series created by director Norman Macdonnell and writer John Meston. The stories take place in and around Dodge City, Kansas, during the settlement of the American West. The central character is lawman Marshal Matt Dillon, played by William Conrad on radio and James Arness on television. When aired in the UK, the television series was initially titled ''Gun Law'', later reverting to ''Gunsmoke''. The radio series ran from 1952 to 1961. John Dunning〔See Dunning. p. 305.〕 wrote that among radio drama enthusiasts, "''Gunsmoke'' is routinely placed among the best shows of any kind and any time." The television series ran for 20 seasons from 1955 to 1975, and stands as the United States' longest-running prime time, live-action drama with 635 episodes. In 2010, ''Law & Order'' tied ''Gunsmoke'' for most seasons for a live action drama series when it finished its twentieth and final season, but the show finished 179 episodes short of ''Gunsmokes final total; in terms of prime-time scripted series with continuing characters, ''The Simpsons'' is the only program to exceed 20 seasons. At the end of its run in 1975, ''Los Angeles Times'' columnist Cecil Smith wrote: "''Gunsmoke'' was the dramatization of the American epic legend of the west. Our own ''Iliad'' and ''Odyssey'', created from standard elements of the dime novel and the pulp western as romanticized by () Buntline, () Harte, and () Twain. It was ever the stuff of legend." == Radio series (1952-1961) == In the late 1940s, CBS chairman William S. Paley, a fan of the Philip Marlowe radio serial, 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 Crooked Wheel". Two auditions were created in 1949. The first was very much like a hardboiled detective series and starred Michael Rye (credited as Rye Billsbury) as Dillon; the second 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. But there was a complication. 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 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〔Dunning, p. 303.〕 notes, "The show drew critical acclaim for unprecedented realism." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Gunsmoke」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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