STARRING

PETER BROWN as Deputy Johnny McKay

THE LAWMEN

JOHN RUSSELL as Marshal Dan Troop

In the collective opinion of our NiteOwl video group of baby boomers, LAWMAN, along with Maverick, represented  the best of the Warner's Westerns which dominated ABC in the late 50's through mid-60's, although we liked them all.  Where  Maverick was a delightful, light-hearted romp with occasional serious moments, Lawman was a straightforward serious Western with occasional light moments.  The half-hour format, almost unheard of today for a drama, required a compact, no frills story.  There was little time for romance or development of secondary characters.

Despite those limitations, the series did a good job of  developing  the two main characters and their relationship while presenting  a solid story   The stand-out quality of Lawman may be attributed in great part to the efforts of the two stars both of whom came to the series as excellent horsemen and gun handlers as well as actors dedicated to their craft.  They were perfectly cast and together "conspired" to maintain the consistency and integrity of their characters in the face of constantly changing writers and directors, barebones budgets and frantic shooting schedules.

John Russell, a 6'4" ramrod straight, ex-Marine with the most compelling steely gaze on television, embodied the courageous, no-nonsense Marshal Dan Troop.  Russell reportedly modeled the character after a superior in the Marine Corps.  Russell was thirty-seven when the series started, only fourteen years older than his young co-star.  However, he saw Dan Troop as an experienced,  tempered lawman in his mid to late forties.  To that end, he added gray to his hair and played the character a decade older than he himself was, something not common in youth conscious show business.

Peter Brown, a lean, handsome 6 footer, had no problem playing a character four or five years younger than his already youthful twenty-three.  [The producer has said that Johnny McKay was intended to be only eighteen when the series started.  The series debuted on Peter's 23rd birthday which means he was 22 when the first episodes were filmed.  In the  third season episode "Cornered", Johnny tells someone he's 21.]  Together the two men portrayed a classic mentor/protégé team that fell just shy of a father-son relationship.  [The series generally avoided sentimentality, but for those who looked for it, the bond between the two characters was even stronger than the words exchanged would suggest.]    The promos for the series described Dan Troop as  a lawman of "strength and purpose" and Johnny McKay as "the boy he trained to fight by his side."

LAWMAN was one of the many Western  series which dominated television in the late 1950's thru most of the 1960's.  The black & white, half-hour show ran for four seasons, debuting on October 5, 1958 and ending its run on October 2, 1962.   The last new episode aired on June 24, 1962.  [Summer reruns used to start much later in the season.]  In four seasons, Lawman broadcast 156 episodes, 39 episodes per season about a third more than a modern series generally broadcasts.

For most of its run it followed Maverick at 8:30 p.m. on Sunday nights paired with Colt .45. or The Rebel and opposite that Sunday night classic, The Ed Sullivan Show. In Lawman's  final season, Maverick, which was struggling without James Garner, was moved to 6:30 p.m. on Sundays [Sunday prime time used to start earlier] and Lawman was isolated between two short-lived, one-hour, non-Western dramas:  Follow the Sun and Bus Stop for most of the season.  In April of 1962 it moved to 10:30 p.m until it's last rerun was aired on October 2, 1962.  Despite it's high-powered competition and the sheer number of Westerns aired at the time, Lawman generally achieved decent ratings, hitting No. 15 in its second season.  It might well have continued it's run had not ABC decided to run a two-hour movie on Sunday nights.  When the producers were offered a less desirable time-slot by the network, they declined and one of the best Westerns on the small screen was cancelled.

To our knowledge Lawman has never been released on video or even been rerun in the states during the age of VCR's except for a recent run of the first two seasons in Australia.   It's scheduled to run on Canada's Lonestar channel.  All our copies are bootleg videos copied from 16 mm versions bought up from local TV stations or other archives.  Check CRU's PAGE for good copies.  Our group is seeking three missing episodes: "Hassayampa", "Tarnished Badge", "Blind Hate" .  We wrote the episode summaries for those episodes from copies of the scripts with credit lists from Harris M. Lentz's Television Westerns Episode Guide, supplemented by studio stills when we have them.  The rest of our episode summaries and credits lists are taken directly from the televised version of the episode itself.

  Every Sunday night the show opened with Marshal Troop tossing a rifle to Deputy McKay who in the first season and part of the second sighted it, but later just hefted it with approval.