Lucas & Mark

Dispatching the bad guys with a souped-up, rapid-fire Winchester rifle, Lucas McCain (Chuck Connors) is The Rifleman, a widower, homesteader and peacekeeper in North Fork, New Mexico Territory. A Union veteran of the Civil War, McCain helps maintain order in the rough Old West town while striving to raise his son, Mark (Johnny Crawford), into an honorable and strong man, promoting such values as fair play, neighborliness and the use of violence only as a last resort.

 

Before Sam Peckinpah made his masterpiece THE WILD BUNCH and that intriguing film STRAW DOGS, he wrote for a Western THE RIFLEMAN. His pilot for the show starred a young Dennis Hopper who would be unrecognizable to many, as a young man who had been carrying a pistol since he was six. 

As Connors said in an interview, the show wasn't about casual killing like some TV shows, "Even a lawman in the performance of his duty remembers a killing of his dying day."

The Rifleman is one of the best-written westerns of its time. The show was only a thirty-minute show, but it was enough time for us to see Mark grow up over the span of 5 seasons (168 episodes from 1958-1963). You might never find another Father and Son show like it.

The show had its day players and they played more than one character. Sometimes, they were good guys. Other times Villians. And sometimes, they might play that same character who came back a different person.