By Michaela Gordoni
GUNSMOKE and REACHER are climbing the streaming charts.
Following its Season 3 release, REACHER maintained its No. 1 spot in Nielsen’s streaming rankings. It had 1.4 billion minutes viewed from March 3-9 on Amazon Prime Video, per Deadline.
GUNSMOKE, a 1950s western series, made the top 10 acquired streaming list at No. 8. It had 646 million viewing minutes across Paramount+ and Peacock March 3-9. The show’s quiet audience has been steadily growing for a while, with an impressive 10 billion viewing minutes in 2024.
Movieguide® reported in January, “GUNSMOKE was the longest-running TV prime-time series until THE SIMPSONS and has 20 years of episodes available. It first came out in 1955 and ran for 20 seasons on CBS. Neilsen ranked it as a top-rated show for a few of those years.”
Most of its audience is above the age of 50.
Screen Rant credits REACHER’s wild success to its high quality of production and story balanced with mystery, humor and action. The script sticks closely to its source material — a 28 book series by Jim Grant (pen name Lee Child). It also helped that Tom Cruise starred in the successful JACK REACHER movies, so audiences were already familiar with the franchise.
The series has a top-notch creative team, too. Grant serves as an executive producer, and Nick Santora, who’s worked on THE SOPRANOS and LAW & ORDER, writes and produces. Christopher McQuarrie, who directed several MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movies, serves as the series’ director.
John Meston, who helped develop GUNSMOKE for TV, believes the series’ selling point is its actors.
Related: Amazon Prime’s REACHER Relies on Excessive Violence, Nudity
“Everybody has tried to copy GUNSMOKE,” Meston said in an interview with Florida Today. “But what they don’t realize is that the honesty of these people — Jim Arness, Dennis Weaver, Amanda Blake, Milburn Stone — is the key. That is GUNSMOKE’s secret weapon.”
Arness, who played GUNSMOKE lead Matt Dillon, also credited the show’s success to its actors.
“We got into a sort of a mindset where we felt like we were really there and this was really happening. It’s a hard sort of intangible thing that occurs,” he said a 1989 interview with The Tennessean.
Arness was very dedicated to the show.
When asked about how he felt about the show’s 11th season in 1965, he said, “About the same as the tenth season, the ninth, the eighth. They ask me when I’m going to quit and all I can keep on saying is that I’m in this saddle until it wears out — or until I wear out the public.”
Arness kept his word. He stayed in that “saddle” until the show’s 20th and final season.
While REACHER dominates with its high-quality production and loyal fanbase, TV classic GUNSMOKE quietly rides on, attracting nostalgic viewers.
Read Next: Western Cinema in the Golden Age
- Content: +2Share:
- Content: +3