This Classic ’60s Western Was Deemed One Of TV’s Most Violent Shows

Sometimes a television Western is more than a Western, and that was certainly true of “The Wild Wild West.” The adventure series combined the horse opera with science fiction, espionage, and pre-steampunk aesthetics, spanning four seasons on CBS in the late ’60s. Unfortunately, the show was also deemed “one of the most violent programs on television,” per a 1969 government report titled “Mass Media and Violence: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence,” which eventually led to its cancellation.

According to the report, “The Wild Wild West” produced nearly seven incidents of violence per episode, which was apparently an outrageous number at the time. Of course, it’s hard to expect otherwise in a program that follows U.S. Secret Service agents James T. West (Robert Conrad) and Artemus Gordon (Ross Martin) as, under special orders from President Ulysses S. Grant (James Gregory; Roy Engel), they take down ne’er-do-wells in their efforts to protect “the leader of the free world.” Sadly, those efforts came about at the wrong time in TV history.

Following increased government pressure and anti-violent sentiments due to the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, this genre-defining Western was singled out and put on the chopping block. “It was a sacrificial lamb,” producer Bruce Lansbury once told “The Mission: Impossible Dossier” author Patrick J. White. “It went off with a 32 or 33 share which in those days was virtually break-even, but always won its time period.”

The Wild Wild West found new life years later

Ratings were never the issue for “The Wild Wild West.” The unconventional Western ran for 104 episodes on CBS between 1965 and 1969. Barely preceding the network’s infamous “rural purge” in the early 1970s, star Robert Conrad took the news of its cancellation quite well. “I was in New York doing some charity work and got this call from the president of CBS. He broke the news the show had been canceled,” Conrad told SFGate years later. “I told him I appreciated the call. I meant it.”

For Conrad, it wasn’t as stark a blow as it may have been for fans. “Four seasons of make-believe. It was time to be over, to move on to other projects,” he continued. “Ross [Martin] and I had done it all, and we were proud.” Of course, “The Wild Wild West” wouldn’t end there. Despite the cancellation, Conrad and Martin returned to their roles a decade later for two made-for-TV revival films: “The Wild Wild West Revisited” and “More Wild Wild West.”

And even that wasn’t the end of the story. Without Conrad’s involvement, the “James Bond of the West” was rebooted into one of the worst movies based on a TV show in 1999, with Will Smith and Kevin Kline starring as West and Gordon. Still, despite this horrid big-screen travesty, “The Wild Wild West” is one TV Western that deserves a reboot.

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