Since the advent of cinema, Hollywood has had a long-time love affair withWesterns. Film, television, radio, and even comic books have highlighted Western icons such as lawmen, gunslingers, and other outlaw types, and those legends have continued well into the 21st century. In the 1950s, a wave of Western television shows hit the airwaves across America, with many adapting true stories into new 30-minute segments for the whole family. A popular subject of Western literature and filmmaking was none other than the famed lawmanWyatt Earp, who was best known for his part in “The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.“Earp’s story has been adapted time and again, but there has never been a version of his life story quite likeThe Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp,widely regarded as one ofthe greatest TV Westerns of all time.
The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp
Loosely based on historical fact, the series portrays the gunslinging Wyatt Earp and his successful determination for law and order.
Hugh O’Brian’s Work On ‘The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp’ Defined His Career
Premiering only four days before the hit seriesGunsmoke,The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earpisconsidered to be the first TV Western ever to be written exclusively for adults. StarringHugh O’Brianas the titular lawman,Wyatt Earpquickly rose to prominence,becoming a “Top 10” rated series and a household favorite for many. O’Brian himself––bearing a striking likeness to Earp––rose to stardom through his time onThe Life and Legend, which became his most famous work. After the series' six seasons, he even reprised the part of Wyatt Earp for a number of projects in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One such work wasWyatt Earp: Return to Tombstone, a sort of sequel to his ’50s seriesthat even reused footage from his prior work in flashback capacity, and highlighted Earp’s later years.
But long before he returned after a few decades' absence,O’Brian’s Wyatt Earp stood for the law while not being afraid to occasionally bend it. Sure, the lawman was a straight-shooter on the series and often stuck to his consistent morality, but he wasn’t afraid to criticize the law when it was clearly being abused. The show’s black-and-white aesthetic lent well to its simplistic morality in which bad guys were always bad guys, and good guys were just that. Painting a simpler version of the Old West,The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earpbalanced both the true story of the titular Marshal with the legends that fueled the mythos of the American West.
‘The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp’ Moved All Over The Country, Not Unlike The Western Legend Himself
An interesting fact about the real-life Wyatt Earp is that he spent time in some of the Old West’s most prominent locales. From Dodge City, Kansas, and Tombstone, Arizona to Deadwood, South Dakota, and even Los Angeles, California, the most famous Earp really got around. ThoughThe Life and Legend of Wyatt Earpdoesn’t chronicle each of Wyatt Earp’s moves,it finds itself following the lawman across the country on more than one occasion. Though the show starts out in the overly corrupt Ellsworth, Kansas, Earp moves to Witchita only five episodes in, leaving his young ally Bat Masterson (Mason Alan Dinehart) behind for a while. After over 30 episodes in Witchita, Earp moves to Dodge City at the beginning of Season 2, where he remains as Marshal for three more seasons.
But considering thatWyatt Earp’s most famous gunfight came from Tombstone, Arizona,the series moved there in its fifth season.The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earpended with a three-part adaptation of the infamous “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” a historical event that was most popularly adapted in the 1993 pictureTombstonestarringKurt Russelland again a year later inKevin Costner’sWyatt Earp. Like many theatrical Westerns before it,The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earptook plenty of inspiration fromStuart Lake’sWyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, a best-selling biography of the titular Western hero. Interestingly enough,Frontier Marshalwasn’t entirely accurate to the real historical accountand helped propagate some well-known myths about the lawman.
The ‘Wyatt Earp’ Series Played Fast And Loose With The Real Historical Accounts, Especially Concerning Earp’s Morality
Among the Western myths thatThe Life and Legend of Wyatt Earptook into account was the fact that Earp didn’t actually sport a Colt Buntline Special. Plenty of researchers, such as those from theKansas Historical Society, have considered Earp’s famed “Buntline Special” as a myth that had been erroneously reported by Stuart Lake’s famedWyatt Earpbiography. Of course,The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earpfurther popularized the likely untrue lawman/weapon combo, and because of the show’s high-ranking status, the Buntline Special has continued to appear in Wyatt Earp-related media to this day despite the fact thathe often used a Remington pistol.
Of course, whether Earp carried the famed gun or not doesn’t particularly matter, but what does is the show’s pacification of the historical figure. For instance, whileThe Life and Legendpromoted Earp asa standard ’50s Western caricatureof an upright and always-ethical hero (a figure we rarely see nowadays), the real Wyatt Earp was a complex individual with plenty of grime and grit to go around. Contrary to the show’s portrayal, the real Earp sometimes saw himself on the wrong side of the law. He was once accused of stealing horses from Indian Territory, violently assaulted a man in defense of a friend’s honor (the real reason he moved from Witchita to Dodge City), and didn’t exactly distance himself from gambling and prostitution.
In contrast,The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earppulls more from Western folklore than it does from facts about the lawman’s life. This isn’t uncommon in Hollywood, butit did contribute to the public perception that Wyatt Earp was an upstanding U.S. Marshalwith a clean record. Movies likeTombstoneandWyatt Earppaint a more accurate picture of the morally ambiguous lawman, and while he was known for being a good peace officer in his day,he wasn’t exactly the squeaky clean Marshal that Hugh O’Brian played on TV.
‘The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp’ Ended With A Strange Bang
Despite the changes concerning fact and fiction,The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earpwas a hit with audiences and ran for six seasons,and over 200 episodes, between 1955 and 1961. The show was almost always in the “Top 30” in Neilson ratings (ranking Number 6 during the 1957-58 season) and certainly drew in a strong crowd. After moving to Tombstone for the show’s last two seasons, the series ended with its own adaptation of Earp’s infamous gunfight, peaking in the penultimate episode “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.” But that wasn’t the end of it.
The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earpactually ended with the next episode, “The Outlaws Cry Murder,” in which Earp, his two brothers, Virgil (John Anderson) and Morgan (Dirk London), and their friend Doc Holiday (Douglas Fowley) are charged with murder due to the events of the previous episode. While they escape the Clanton gang’s plan,the episode ends somewhat abruptly, with the revelation that the foursome is still being tried for murder. “It looks pretty bad, sir,” Wyatt explains. “But we aren’t dead yet.” With that, Wyatt leaves his brothers and Holiday behind, walking out the door and announcing his plans to grab the gang something to eat.After, the show simply ends there.
Thankfully,O’Brian did return as Earp years laterin the aforementioned independent film,Wyatt Earp:Return to Tombstone.The movie reveals that Earp survived the impromptu series finale, but it was still a strange way forThe Life and Legend of Wyatt Earpto end its significant run on ABC. Despite the strange ending,Wyatt Earpwas a hit with audiences everywhere and still holds up pretty wellafter all these years.Hugh O’Brian’s charm as Wyatt Earp has been unmatched after all this time, and even now the legend continues.
The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earpcan be streamed on Amazon Prime Video.
