There are so many choices about what to watch on TV and most of it is of poor quality, silly, profane or dull.

Lately, I have been watching reruns of Gunsmoke on the INSP Channel.

Set in Dodge City, Kansas (an actual city), Gunsmoke was perhaps the most popular western TV show in history. It ran for what was then a record 20 seasons. It started out in black-and-white in a 30-minute format, then a 60-minute format and when it finally ended in 1975 it was a full hour in color.

I am old enough to remember when TV shows started switching from black-and-white to color because people were starting to buy color TVs. We didn’t have one until after 1968 and it was a bit of thrill to go to someone’s house and watch a show in color.

Every episode of Gunsmoke was a morality play. The bad guys didn’t prevail in Dodge City.

Matt Dillon, played brilliantly by actor James Arness, was a U.S. marshal headquartered in Dodge City, a rough cow town on the prairie that was right in the path of large cattle drives from Texas and Oklahoma to the railroad.

(Some episode refer to Oklahoma which is odd because the show is set around 1875 when Oklahoma wasn’t a state. I guess it was poetic license because viewers might not know where Indian Territory was back then.)

To be honest, I like the black-and-white episodes the best.

Arness was a World War II veteran. John Wayne recommended him for the part and in fact Wayne introduced the first episode.

Matt Dillon had a girlfriend, Miss Kitty Russell (played by Amanda Blake), who owned the Long Branch Salon. They never came close to getting hitched.  I think Matt didn’t think that being a lawman and marriage went hand in hand. Kitty had at least one fling but she always came back to Matt. I understand he had one romance, but that was because of amnesia and when he recovered his memory, he came back to Kitty.

Milburn Stone played Dr. Galen Adams, the feisty old frontier doctor who was best friends with the marshal. Only Arness was in more episodes than Stone, who dropped out in the 1970s due to a bout with cancer.

One of the most memorable characters was Chester Goode, played by actor Dennis Weaver. Weaver pretended to have a limp. He was the marshal’s deputy. Later, Weaver (who was from Joplin, Missouri, but ran track at the University of Oklahoma), left to pursue a movie career. He was replaced by Ken Curtis, who played Festus Hagin.

Burt Reynolds played blacksmith Quint Asper for a few seasons. Roger Ewing also played a deputy in later seasons. Buck Taylor, who has been to Tulsa several times for the Wanenmacher Gun Show, played Newly O’Brien.

It’s fascinating to see young actors who guest starred on Gunsmoke and later became big stars in their own rights. That included Jodie Foster, Kim Darby, Buddy Epsen, William Shatner, June Lockhart, Forrest Tucker, Slim Pickens, Lesley Ann Warren, John Astin, and several more.

William Conrad was a guest star. He actually played Matt Dillon on the popular radio show that preceded the TV show. He was rejected because he was overweight.

Here’s what I’ve noticed so far.

• Someone gets shot in almost every episode and most of the time, one shot is all that it takes to kill them.
• Many times, bad guys came to Dodge just to kill Matt Dillon. Sometimes it was for revenge and sometimes it was to get a reputation as a gunslinger.
• Matt Dillon had the fastest draw in Dodge City. He never killed anyone that didn’t draw on him first. He never shot anyone in the back.
• Matt Dillion got shot sometimes but obviously it was never fatal. Doc always patched him up.
• Matt Dillon had the reputation of being a friend to the Indians. This was not a real prevalent view during the 1950s (Gunsmoke started in 1955). Dillon kept the U.S. Army from mistreating various tribes and he argued that the government keep their promises.
• James Arness had a great sense of humor and sometimes that surfaced in an episode. Doc argued with Chester all the time and when Chester left, Doc argued with Festus.
• The characters drank beer and whiskey constantly and always kept a pot of coffee going on a stove or campfire.
• Miss Kittie made her living owning and running a saloon, The Long Branch. It was never stated but she hired saloon girls who weren’t always very wholesome or virtuous.
• Religion wasn’t a big topic on the show. Some episodes showed preachers in a bad light and some didn’t. Dillion would say a few words at a funeral.
• As far as I have seen, Marshal Dillon never told some to “Get the @#!$%@ out of Dodge” but he did run a bunch of people out his town. I asked a young person if he had ever heard of Gunsmoke or “get out of Dodge” and he had not.

It was an amazing show that got unexpectedly canceled because the head of CBS thought they had too many westerns. It had been a Top 10 show for most of its run and was in the Top 30 when it was canceled. It was America’s top-rated TV show from 1957 to 1961. It declined when it went to an hour format in 1967 and it almost got canceled but the fans wouldn’t have it.

People, especially children, learn values from the media. Kids today could learn a lot from Gunsmoke and Matt Dillon.

Adults could, too.