The Adult Western, and What It Cost

Radio Gunsmoke is a grim piece of work, and that is the compliment. Dodge City is not a set of saloon doors; it is dust, wind, a marshal who is tired in the first scene and worse by the last, and a body count that is never treated as a punchline.

William Conrad's Matt Dillon is the performance that makes it. He plays authority as a burden rather than a swagger, and the writing supports him: episodes routinely end with the wrong person dead and nobody satisfied. Very few weekly programmes of any era were allowed to be this pessimistic.

The sound work is the other half — the boardwalk, the horses, the space between buildings. You always know where you are standing. Television took the title and the characters and left the mood behind.