‘Gunsmoke’ aired from 1955 to 1974 and set a new standard for TV drama Tereza Shkurtaj is a writer-reporter at PEOPLE. She has been working for PEOPLE since 2025. Her work has previously appeared in ...

The CBS series Gunsmoke was set in the frontier town of Dodge City, Kansas. The show revolved around U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon (James Arness), Deputy Chester (Dennis Weaver), Doc Adams (Milburn Stone), ...

“Gunsmoke” debuted on television in 1955. Stars of the show included James Arness as Matt Dillon; Burt Reynolds, who starred as Quint Asper, the blacksmith; Ken Curtis as Festus; Amanda Blake as Miss ...

One running thread throughout the show was the will-they-or-won’t-they relationship between Dillon and Miss Kitty. While Arness and Blake shared a palpable chemistry, the two characters never truly ...

Seventy years ago, on September 10, 1955, a gunfighter named Matt Dillon first strode into Dodge City on CBS, Gunsmoke, helping to change the nature of TV Westerns, eventually running for 20 years, ...

The late, great Johnny Cash, talking between songs on one of his albums, admitted he used to stand in front of the TV and try to outdraw actor James Arness during the opening sequence of “Gunsmoke.” ...

Few shows have run on network television for as long as Gunsmoke ran on CBS. For twenty years, the Western series braved television sets after first jumping from a radio drama to the screen, and later ...

Offscreen, James Arness traded Dodge City’s saloon dust for the comfort of his own king-size bed. Photographed in 1956, the towering Gunsmoke star relaxes with a script for an upcoming episode, ...

This summer, as the Black Lives Matter protests overlapped with “safer at home” practices, I slipped into binge-watching the old TV western, “Gunsmoke” — in particular, the pioneer episodes of the ...

The 6-foot-7 actor, who also starred in the 1950s sci-fi classics "Them!" and "The Thing From Another World," thanks fans for their support with a posthumous letter on his website. By Mike Barnes ...