The two hundred and forty-fourth TV show: #50 The Rifleman
I doubt this is a revelation from what I've written so far, but westerns don't really land for me. The Rifleman isn't bad, it's got better kid/teen acting than a number of shows I've seen recently, but its stories just washed over me. The rifle is a gimmick that I don't think I ever really noticed, and while in theory I quite like the idea of trying to do the right thing, in more of a moral way than other shows do, but it takes some excitement out of a genre usually built around it. It's not that it's staid, it's not that it's bad, I just never found there was a moment where the show rose above that level.