Season 1 • Episode 23
LatestA would be homesteading family is so afraid after seeing two men lynched by a rancher's gang, they refuse to cooperate with Marshall Crown, until one of them blackmails the rancher.
Cimarron Strip is an American Western television series that aired on CBS from September 1967 to March 1968. Starring Stuart Whitman as Marshal Jim Crown, the series was produced by the creators of Gunsmoke. Reruns of the original show were aired in the summer of 1971. Cimarron Strip was one of only three 90-minute weekly Western series that aired during the 1960s, and the only 90-minute series of any kind to be centered primarily around one lead character. Cimarron Strip was set in the Oklahoma Panhandle, which comprises, east to west, Beaver, Texas, and Cimarron counties in Oklahoma. The show is set in 1888, just as the continuous frontier of the West, which once ran from the Canadian to the Mexican border, was closing. In less than five years there would no longer be that "continuous frontier," only pockets of undeveloped land. This was the late "Wild West" that Marshall Jim Crown was called to defend.
Cinematography
Oklahoma Panhandle shot like epic cinema, not cramped TV.
Acting
Stuart Whitman carries 90 minutes weekly—no ensemble crutch.
Production
Only 90-minute single-lead series ever attempted. Hubris!
Creator
Christopher Knopf
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Cimarron Strip was CBS's attempt to compete with NBC's The Virginian, another 90-minute Western—but unlike that ensemble show, this gambled everything on one lead actor.
The 1888 setting intentionally captures the 'closing frontier' anxiety that historian Frederick Jackson Turner made famous—this Western mourns the West itself.
US
