The Loner is an American Western television series that played for one season on CBS from 1965 to 1966, with the alternate sponsorship of Philip Morris and Procter & Gamble. The series was created by Rod Serling a year after the cancellation of the series The Twilight Zone. It was one of the last TV series broadcast by CBS in black-and-white.
The series was set in the years immediately after the American Civil War. Lloyd Bridges played the title character, William Colton, a former Union cavalry captain who went to the American west in search of a new life. Each episode dealt with Colton's encounters with various individuals on his trek west.
Rod Serling was the series' creator. Longtime TV Guide critic Cleveland Amory wrote that Serling "obviously intended The Loner to be a realistic, adult Western," but the show's ratings indicated it was "either too real for a public grown used to the unreal Western or too adult for juvenile Easterners". Serling had expressed dislike for some of the television Westerns of the time in an editorial that described the premise for "Showdown with Rance McGrew", an episode of The Twilight Zone in which a primadonna Western actor encounters the ghost of Jesse James; in that editorial, he is quoted as saying: "it seems a reasonable conjecture that if there are any television sets up in cowboy heaven and any of these rough-and-wooly nail-eaters could see with what careless abandon their names and exploits are being bandied about, they're very likely turning over in their graves - or worse, getting out of them."
The Loner was broadcast Saturday nights at 9:30 Eastern Time. It debuted on September 18, 1965; the final episode was broadcast March 12, 1966; selected repeats continued through April 30.
The Loner was created by Rod Serling following the end of his anthology series The Twilight Zone. According to the television trade magazine Television Age, the concept originated several years earlier as an hour-long script that Serling had shown to producer William Dozier in 1961. The project was initially rejected by CBS, but Dozier later revived it as a half-hour series when the network was looking for programming for its Saturday evening schedule.
Dozier and Serling developed the program around a single continuing character, William Colton, a former Union cavalry officer wandering through the postâÂÂCivil War West. Lloyd Bridges was cast in the title role early in development. Serling planned to establish the tone and direction of the series by writing the first thirteen episodes himself.
Serling described the series as an attempt to produce a more realistic and adult Western than was typical of television at the time. Early in the programâÂÂs run, newspaper reports noted tensions between Serling and the network over the amount of violence in the series, with Serling reportedly resisting requests to increase action elements.
In June 2016, Shout! Factory, in conjunction with Timeless Media Group, released The Loner as a Region 1 4-DVD set containing all 26 episodes of the series plus a featurette, The Wandering Man's Burden: Making "The Loner". The DVD set was initially made available in North America as a Walmart exclusive (both in-store and online).
In 1998, Jerry Goldsmith's theme music and his two episode scores ("An Echo Of Bugles" and "One Of The Wounded") were released by Film Score Monthly on a limited edition soundtrack album alongside his score for Stagecoach.