Enjoy two free western episodes of Gunsmoke starring William Conrad A) 9/19/53 There Was Never a Horse B) 9/26/53 Fawn Around Dodge City and in the territory on West, there’s just one way to handle the killers and the spoilers and that’s with a U.S. Marshal and the smell of … GUNSMOKE! In the late 1940s, CBS chairman William S. Paley, a fan of the Phillip Marlowe radio series, asked his programming chief to develop a hardboiled Western series. Several attempts were made but the project was shelved until 1952 when Norman Macdonnell and John Meston were brought in. Produced for adult listeners, Macdonnell and Meston set Gunsmoke in Dodge City, Kansas, during the thriving cattle days of the 1870s. Few radio westerns gave any inkling of how brutal the Old West was in reality. On Gunsmoke, the stories were grim, the deaths violent and life on the plains was harsh. Radio audiences had never heard anything like Gunsmoke and they made it the #1 western on radio drawing critical acclaim for unprecedented realism. The dialogue was often slow and halting, and as a result of the outstanding sound effects, listeners had a nearly palpable sense of the prairie where the show was set. The effects were subtle but multilayered, giving the show a spacious and authentic feel. Gunsmoke soon made a successful transition to television (with a completely different cast) becoming the longest-running dramatic series in TV history. Several of the radio scripts were adapted for the television show. Join William Conrad (U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon), Parley Baer (Deputy Chester Proudfoot), Georgia Ellis (Kitty Russell) and Howard McNear (Doc Adams) in the continuing story of the violence that moved west with young America and the story of a man who moved with it, Matt Dillon, United States Marshal.