I'm also wondering why there are no martial arts themed shows on tv nowadays

Guess not popular enough

I miss Brisco County Jr. Sigh

Makes sense. Those movies (Gravity is a good example) transcend genre. I'm a science fiction fan, but I would have gone to see Gravity regardless.

Guess they've sort of morphed into the fantasy genre now. Still a lot of popular fantasy martial arts films coming from Asia, but most of them seem to have a historical connection...more costume epics than Bruce Lee-type flicks.

Barring a major crossover star (Jet Li is getting a bit long in the tooth) or the emergence of a new Seagal/Van Damme type, it seems we're relegated to WWE- or UFC-type of martial arts films.

Wonder how a remake of Kung Fu would do today (western/martial arts hybrid)? Hard to imagine that studios turned down Bruce for the part because he was 'too ethnic' (or 'too Asian'). Could have been a classic.

Westerns also perform terribly at the box office outside of the U.S. Hollywood views global box office as an essential part of revenue and often passes on projects for those reasons.

Westerns are typically considered to be very formulaic. The trick to developing a successful western TV show would be to develop a uniquely compelling story and relatable characters first, then find a way to set it in the old west.

I could be wrong about this, but I would think a western would be a relatively inexpensive show as the set pieces are minimalistic or naturally occurring.

Even though it's set in New York City, I'd consider the BBC's COPPER a 'Western'.

That's a selective list. After the success of Unforgiven, studios rushed out a few more westerns like The Quick and the Dead, Posse, Bad Girls, Wyatt Earp, and Wild Bill, all flops. Only Tombstone made any money. This scared off studios for a while.

Lonesome Dove was a successful miniseries, but the TV series only lasted two seasons.

As for recently, the series Quickdraw premiered recently on Hulu, but I'm not sure many are aware of it.

I don't think this is true. HBO had success with the series Rome, and Showtime has had success with The Tudors and their show The Borgias ran for 3 seasons. Starz had the series Spartacus. The CW has the new series Reign about Mary, Queen of Scots.

I haven't seen it yet, but I don't think Gravity counts as sci-fi. There doesn't appear to be anything in the film beyond today's technology or science.

Actually, lots of minorities figured in western history--Mexicans, Indians (of course), and, blacks who went out west in large numbers, not to mention the famous "buffalo soldiers," the Indian name for the black cavalry regiments. When I dig back into old B-westerns of the 1930s, I'm sometimes surprised at the large number of them that had major Mexican and/or Indian characters, and more often than not played by actual Mexican and Native American actors.

It's an "Eastern" . I actually thought of Copper, but we got behind in Season One & need to catch up on BD. I'd almost put "Ripper Street" in the same category, but we're getting a little far afield.

Re: the role of minorities in the west...there were quite a few fairly prominent (historically, if not in popular news of the day) American-Africans who were noteworthy. Little surprised that more hasn't been done to develop their stories for cable or cinema.

Phantom Stranger made a good point about international appeal. Westerns used to be big in Europe (Leone, et al), but has their appeal fizzled there, too? I know that a lot of U.S. "flops" such as John Carter did fine overseas, which keeps big-budget FX movies from totally tanking.

What are the Nielsen numbers for Encore's Western channels? That may provide some guidance. And they show some decent westerns, sometimes.

I second that!

The central question in the original post seems to be "Why aren't there television shows about sharply separated good guys and bad guys anymore?"

Here's my analysis. The basic plot of a television western is that a disruptive element comes to town full of good people. The hero uses violence to remove the disruption returns the town to its straight-edge, conformist character. Everyone is put back in his or her place, and all is right in the world.

But today's society isn't as worried about disruptions to conformity as it was back in the early 1960s, so people aren't as likely to identify with a hero who puts everyone back in their places. They're apt to question why the saloon girl or the Mexican cowhand are happy to get thrust back into their social roles.

I also don't think audiences want to see avatars of virtue like Clayton Moore. They prefer a wider spectrum of behavior.

Even in today's cop shows, the cops are kind of sketchy. The police heroes will cut corners when no one is looking. The civilian heroes, like in The Mentalist or Elementary, are completely without ethics. They'll violate the rules to take out the worst characters in a murky world.

It's a recognition that the world is a complex place, that requires difficult decisions. Is it okay to threaten a mostly decent guy with prison time if the cop wants to pressure him to give evidence against his girlfriend? How much collateral damage should be done to people's lives in catching the bad guy?

Those stories are more interesting to me than watching Chuck Connors kill a couple of men every week and then go home with his son. I think a lot of television viewers agree.

Taken from the Winter/Midseason premiere thread

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/FVlPXVczArg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

To bad it got canned.

Post-Roman European history through about the late Victorian era is almost entirely ignored as a popular subject in Hollywood movies and programs these days. It's very easy to include minority actors in a project on the Roman Empire, given the diversity of its territories and the general Mediterranean setting. Reign is the only serious counter-example, but it's the exception that proves the rule and has only been on the air for about ten episodes.

Everything in Hollywood is viewed as an investment and every single project has to cast as wide a net as possible, given the fractured viewing audiences of today. It's also why you rarely see one-gender shows anymore.

Was it ever a popular subject for TV and movies? I don't really recall that many TV shows in the history of TV about this era, while movies seem to be set in this era about as often as they ever were.

PBS just aired a series of films called the Hollow Crown, based on Shakespeare's Henriad.

What about Tudors and Borgias, as well as Borgia?

I just don't see the evidence that Hollywood is "ignoring" that era anymore than it always had.

I'd love more western based shows. I figure if we give the cable networks time one of them will give it another go. Shame Deadwood ended when it did.

PBS gets almost all of its programming from...wait for it...Europe, specifically the UK. A PBS series like Downton Abbey is not a show produced by Hollywood. In fact, most of those historical series you cite are European co-productions (meaning the funding is mostly coming from Europe) meant for both markets.

It isn't hard to imagine if you lived in that time. Who wanted to see a 5'7" asian actor as a lead in a TV show or movie? At least no one I knew growing up. We had guys like Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, John Wayne, Burt Reynolds and a bunch of other big action stars to look up to. Bruce Lee just didn't fit the mold. Even I knew that at a young age and I was just getting into Bruce in the early 70's. He was a risk no one wanted to take on. It's understandable and even Bruce didn't fault them for not taking him on. He understood and took Steve McQueen's advise to leave L.A. He showed them, though? Right?

I'm not sure why being a co-production excludes it from consideration, since so many shows are co-productions nowadays. NBC's Hannibal is a co-production with Gaumont. Rome was a co-production between BBC, HBO, and RAI.

And again, you still haven't provided any evidence that what's occuring today with these types of shows is markedly different than what has always occurred with these shows. What are the prevalent, high-profile shows of the past that were sole US productions?

In many ways, it's not surprising that Europe spearheads productions about European history; it is, after all, their history. It's much like how Westerns were an American TV phenomena, since Westerns were about American history. But aside from Westerns, US television hasn't really dipped into the well of old history (100+ years) for TV shows that often, no matter what continent the history happened on.

Another thought about decline of the Western. Isn't one theory the one made explicit in Toy Story: that young boys ended up trading in Cowboys for Spacemen, i.e. that Sci-Fi came in and replaced Westerns?

I remember the Star Trek was originally pitched as ""Wagon Train to the Stars." Battlestar Galactica took the metaphor one step further, with the fleeing fleet being similar to a wagon train.
http://www.roddenberry.com/entertainment-star-trek
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...rainToTheStars

Westerns were about the "wild frontier," but as that got more and more explored and colonized, the west wasn't so wild anymore. Meanwhile the space race introduced space as the "final frontier," so took over that adventurous, exploratory type of story. The relationship between the Western and space shows was made most explicit with the show Firefly, which caused FOX execs to get confused about why there were horses in its sci-fi series.

I think this is the best analysis. The archetypes and characterizations typical to Westerns have been out of favor for decades. On the other hand, I think the 1800s Western expansion is a great setting for the kind of morally conflicted characters and stories you describe, as evidenced by Deadwood and a few recent movies. This is why I would like to see more of them as well.

I also like Jay G's hypothesis that Sci-fi is the "new Western".

STARZ also aired the 10-part series The White Queen. I think there are several more books in the series but don't know if they're filming them.

Also, Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth and the sequel both aired fairly recently.

All of the above are available on DVD/BD.

Especially when Deadwood just had one more season to go, mirroring the actual original Deadwood (which I think lasted 4 years before burning to the ground).

Excellent reminders. I remember seeing Lee in the Green Hornet and a movie (Marlowe?) in which he jumped flat-footed up to kick out a light fixture. Was kind of fascinated by him, but the guys you cite were the ones everybody wanted to be. I mean, I liked Sulu but wanted to be Kirk. Although I did like Mingo's whip.

It didn't help that Bruce didn't speak English fluently (at least, his pronunciation was unclear, even in Enter the Dragon). Might have been hard for him to carry the dialogue as the lead in a series.

So, yeah, I was speaking through the advantage of hindsight. If I'd been a studio exec, I'd have picked Carradine over Lee. And would have regretted it today.

*******************************************************************************

By the way, thanks to everyone for the discussion. I agree with almost all of the points explaining the lack of westerns. I guess everyone wants 50 shades of grey rather than clear-cut good vs. bad...although a lot of the western heroes had some flaws even back in the 60's. They could be impulsive, reckless, rigid, naive, violent at times (predating Dirty Harry), etc. Yet they had a clear moral compass.

Hadn't heard that Copper was cancelled, and had only heard once before about Klondike (and promptly forgot), so thanks for the updates.

I used to feel that way -- and for the most part I still do. But I do try to be a little more open and like some of the 17-18th century stuff which I used to loathe.

I don't think anyone has mentioned Hell on Wheels, which is a western.

I kind of doubt that Warner Bros. regretted their decision because Kung Fu became a big hit and they did get Bruce to work for them in ETD. So, their decision was correct and they won out on both counts.