What Happened on the Final Episode of ‘Gunsmoke’?
You’d think one of television’s longest-running series would have gotten a chance to go out on its own terms — but Gunsmoke’s cancellation in 1975 robbed its cast, crew, creatives, and fans of any sort of closure.
“We didn’t do a final, wrap-up show,” star James Arness, the actor behind Marshal Matt Dillon, told the Associated Press in 2002. “We finished the 20th year, we all expected to go on for another season, or two or three. The [network] never told anybody they were thinking of canceling.”
In another interview, per Collider, Arness said, “All of us were ready, psychologically, for one more season of Gunsmoke. CBS has led us downstream, and then, when we were down to the wire, they dropped the ax.”
And so Season 20’s “The Sharecroppers,” which aired on CBS on March 31, 1975, serves as a series finale. And an odd one at that … because it offered no major storylines for any of the show’s leads.
The last Gunsmoke episode focuses on … Festus?
Much of the action of “The Sharecroppers” — written by Earl W. Wallace and directed by Leonard Katzman — revolves around Festus Haggen (Ken Curtis), one of Dillon’s deputies in Dodge City.
As the action picks up, a man named Dibble Pugh (played by Little House on the Prairie’s Victor French) is at risk of losing his farm to landlord Linder Hague (Jacques Aubuchon) because Dibble has been too lazy to improve the property. Dibble’s resourceful daughter, Av Marie (Susanne Benton), sends her brother, Abel (The First Edition guitarist Terry Williams), into Dodge to buy a mule. But a trickster named Rupert (Graham Jarvis of Fame fame) cons Abel into buying Festus’ beast of burden.
Festus confronts Abel, whom he believes to be stealing the mule, and accidentally shoots him in the leg. After realizing Abel has been conned, the deputy helps work the Pugh family’s land to make up for injuring him.
And Festus’ arrival works well for Av Marie. She’s set to marry Linder’s son, Toby (Tron’s Bruce Boxleitner), but she’s suspicious her husband-to-be has been calling on other women. So she uses Festus to make Toby jealous. Toby attacks Festus, but after Av Marie confesses her con, Toby apologizes to Festus and takes over his plowing in recompense.
“The Sharecroppers” provided an anticlimactic end for Gunsmoke
Everett Collection
All turns out okay for Festus and the Pughs, but “The Sharecroppers” hardly feels like a series finale befitting the end of a two-decade Western TV saga. Media historian Hal Erickson, per the Winston-Salem Journal, called the episode “a low-key comic exercise emphasizing Festus, in no way suggesting that a two-decade era was about to come to an abrupt end.”
In IMDb reviews, viewers shared mixed feelings about the episode. “It is sad for television history that Festus was the only primary character featured, when three original characters of the show had no significant screen time,” one person wrote.
“Gunsmoke could have gone for at least another season with solid ratings,” someone else said. “CBS owed the cast and crew the room and chance to craft a special send-off episode.”
Another IMDb user, however, shared a more appraising take. “[‘The Sharecroppers’ is] a fresh and lighthearted tribute to the chaotic, petty entanglements that our world was built upon,” that user wrote. “Don’t judge this quaintly tangled tale too harshly; it was meant as an uplifting send-off and not something to be critically acclaimed or bashed. Happy trails to all who made this series the icon that it was.”
Viewers returned to Dodge in a series of Gunsmoke TV movies
Luckily for fans, Gunsmoke’s cancellation and its final episode were not the end of the story. Five TV movies continued the story in the 1980s and 1990s.
“We’re the only TV series that has appeared in five consecutive decades,” Arness told the AP.
Gunsmoke: Return to Dodge aired on CBS in 1987, followed by Gunsmoke: The Last Apache in 1990, Gunsmoke: To the Last Man in 1992, Gunsmoke: The Long Ride in 1993, and Gunsmoke: One Man’s Justice in 1994.
Arness starred in all five, and Return to Dodge also featured former Gunsmoke stars Amanda Blake and Buck Taylor reprising their parts as Newly O’Brian and Miss Kitty Russell, respectively. And Boxleitner, whose role as Toby in “The Sharecroppers” marked one of his first Hollywood credits, played another character and got second billing to Arness in One Man’s Justice.
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