getTV Blog

Westerns have always been populated by stock characters. The Restless Gun combines two archetypes of the genre — “The Retired Gunman” and “The Drifter” — into one uniquely complex anti-hero.

David Garrison may be best known for playing the character of Steve Rhoades for four seasons on Married With Children, but the actor really calls the New York theatre his home. Since graduating from Boston University, Garrison has appeared in countless Broadway productions. He is particularly renown for musicals - from the Gilbert and Sullivan classic The Pirates Of Penzance to originating the role of The Wizard in Wicked.

You don’t have to be a Country music fan to love Dolly Parton and her rags-to-rhinestones success story. In her half-century career, the girl with the “Coat of Many Colors” has grown up to be one of the music industry’s most successful businesswomen — and one of its most enduring stars. And it all started on a television variety show that premiered 43 years ago.

The 1980s were a good time to be a Lee Horsley fan. The hunky, 6-foot-3-inch actor was all over TV screens in the ‘80s, from detective shows like Nero Wolfe and Matt Houston to blockbuster miniseries like Danielle Steele’s Crossings and North And South, Book II. But he truly hit his stride at the end of the decade in the Western drama Guns Of Paradise.

By the mid-1970s, Westerns had largely ridden off into the sunset on network television. When Matt Dillon hung up his gun belt in March of 1975, it marked the end of an era for a format that once seemed bulletproof. Fittingly, it would be James Arness — Gunsmoke’s Marshal Dillon himself — who helped kick off the next stage of the genre’s evolution on TV.

Creating an unforgettable character is a rare achievement on TV. Sherman Hemsley did it twice — with almost no break in between. A year after The Jeffersons ended its 11-season run, Hemsley moved on down I-95 from the East Side of Manhattan to inner city Philadelphia for six seasons on Amen.