Television Westerns Episode Guide: All United States Series, 1949-1996.(Review)(Brief Article)

Television Westerns Episode Guide: All United States Series, 1949-1996. By Harris M. Lentz III. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1997. 568p. acid free, $95 (ISBN 0-7864-0377-2).

Here is a detailed television programming directory dealing with an art form that has declined in recent decades. It is a testimony to the "pioneering" days of television westerns in the United States and to the financial resources that networks put into these shows. (In the 1958-59 television season alone, twenty-eight prime-time westerns were on the network schedules; today, there are just a handful.) Lentz's purpose was to create a reference work that not only provides historical data, but that …