Television Westerns are a sub-genre of the Western, a genre of film, fiction, and drama in which stories are set primarily in the later half of the 19th century in the American Old West), Western Canada and Mexico during the period from about 1860 to the end of the so-called "Indian Wars."
When television became popular in the late 1940s and 1950s, TV westerns quickly became an audience favorite. The peak year for television westerns was 1959, with 26 such shows airing during prime-time. In the 1970s, new elements were incorporated into TV westerns, such as crime drama and mystery whodunnit elements. In the 1990s and 2000s, hour-long westerns and slickly packaged made-for-TV movie westerns were introduced. As well, new elements were once again added to the Western formula, such as the Western-science fiction show Firefly, created by Joss Whedon in 2002.
