Download or read book Who Shot the Sheriff? written by J. Fred MacDonald and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1987 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This intriguing book is a study of the rise and fall of an American genre of entertainment and communication whose symbols and rhetoric helped define American society for decades. Flourishing in the 1950s and 1960s, the television Western has deteriorated to the point where it is now irrelevant and meaningless. Tracing the evolution of the Western from the late 1940s to the 1980s, the author ties the genre to the political innocence and confidence of the Cold War years and suggests that the social reevaluations that began in the 1960s undermined the believability of Westerns and their entertainment value. Seeking to understand the demise of the TV Western, the book offers an analysis of the interrelationships between popular culture, television, and sociopolitical development in the United States during the past four decades.