The Real Reason Why ‘The Wild Wild West’ Was Canceled
Growing up, The Wild, Wild West was one of my favorite shows. I always turned it on after coming home from school — it was the perfect way to decompress after a hard day of reading, writing and a little bit of math at West Bountiful Elementary. I loved watching Robert Conrad and Ross Martin show what it would have been like if James Bond had actually been a government spy in the wild and woolly West.
My memories, however, are not of its original primetime run from 1965 to 1969, but rather from the mid-1970s, when it was featured in reruns on KSTU Channel 20, Salt Lake City’s first UHF TV station. At the time, I had no idea about the heavy-handed way that the U.S. government had targeted this action-packed (and, in the minds of many politicians, way too violent) program, and helped it get pulled from the air.
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The reason the government got involved in a simple TV show was because of the real-life violence that rocked the United States in 1968. During that year, both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated. At the time, President Lyndon B. Johnson commissioned a task force to look into the causes of violence and how it could be prevented in the future.
One of that group’s main findings was that television was having a dramatic impact on society as a whole; people were becoming desensitized to violence because of what they were watching on the small screen. At the time, Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island personally talked to Robert Conrad about The Wild, Wild West and told him that he believed it was harmful and should be canceled.
Ultimately, the show was canceled by CBS — at least in part due to the tremendous pressure they were under to eliminate programs deemed too violent. Ironically, just a couple of years earlier, Senator Robert Byrd had pressured CBS to do the opposite when they were considering canceling his favorite program, Gunsmoke (perhaps that is why it was spared from the mass cancellation of violent television programming in 1969).
Everett Collection
To say that Conrad was upset about the whole thing might be a bit of an understatement. For years, he lamented about the cancellation as well as Pastore’s involvement. Never one to mince words, in 1972 he told journalist Bettelou Peterson, “Pastore is a fool.”
But while Conrad was quick to drop Pastore’s name, it is important to note that Senator Pastore wasn’t the only culprit. There were numerous other members of that committee who were also advocating for CBS to get rid of The Wild, Wild West.
Interestingly, CBS almost immediately regretted canceling The Wild, Wild West, as none of the new shows that they put in that timeslot performed anywhere near as well.
And less than a year later, they began playing reruns of The Wild, Wild West as a summertime fill-in for The Carol Burnett Show. It just goes to show you that you can’t keep a good program down.
Even more proof of the shows resiliency, about a decade later, there were a couple of other opportunities for Robert Conrad and Ross Martin to return to the roles they were most famous for in the TV movies The Wild Wild West Revisited and More Wild, Wild West. While Paul Williams was no Michael Dunn, it was still fun to see James West and Artemis Gordon back on the screen again.
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TV Westerns of the 50's & 60's
September 2021
’50s and ’60s TV Westerns roundup, celebrating the shows and stars of their golden age.
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