Cheyenne (TV Show)

Cheyenne Also known as Warner Brothers Presents ... Cheyenne and Cheyenne: Bronco and The Cheyenne Show: Bronco

• Developed by: Roy Huggins
• Starring: Clint Walker, and L. Q. Jones
• No. of seasons: 7 including the first season on WBP
• No. of episodes: 108
• Executive producer(s): William T. Orr
• Original channel: ABC
• First shown: in Sundays later, Mondays
• Original run: 20 September 1955 – 30 April 1962

Cheyenne is a western television series broadcast on ABC from 1955 to 1962. Like its titular character, it is a pioneer in American television. It was the first hour-long western. It was the first series to be made by a major Hollywood film studio which did not derive from its established film properties. And it is the first of a long chain of William T. Orr-produced Warner Brothers original series.

Cheyenne was a co-winner of the 1957 Golden Globe Award for Television Achievement.

Series history

The series began as a part of Warner Brothers Presents, a program that alternated three different series in rotation. In this first year, Cheyenne traded broadcast weeks with Casablanca and King's Row. Thereafter, Cheyenne was overhauled by outgoing producer Roy Huggins and left the umbrella of WBP. It featured Clint Walker as Cheyenne Bodie, a physically huge cowboy wandering the Old West. The show ran from 1955 to 1963, except for the time Walker struck for higher pay and the series was temporarily replaced by a similar show called Bronco that featured Ty Hardin as Bronco Lane, a virtual clone of Bodie.

After Walker's pay dispute was settled, the two series alternated in the same time slot from 1958 to 1962, with Bronco as the junior partner (only a snippet of his theme song was heard in the opening credits, as a kind of aural footnote to Cheyenne's). Occasionally both Cheyenne and Bronco appeared together in the same episode, both deadly serious as they worked together. Diane Brewster first appeared as Samantha Crawford, the swindler with a fake southern accent, in an episode of Cheyenne called "Dark Rider" before the character memorably migrated to Maverick to become the Maverick brothers' most celebrated nemesis.

At the conclusion of the sixth season, a special episode was aired. Called "A Man Named Ragan", it was a pilot for a program called The Dakotas that would replace Cheyenne in the middle of the next season. However, because Cheyenne Bodie never appeared in "Ragan", the two programs are only tenuously linked.