The Loner: A TV Western with the Serling Touch

Rod Serling wielded a potent weapon in his fight for civil rights: his writing. And he didn’t just tackle the evils of racial prejudice on The Twilight Zone, but on his first post-TZ series: The Loner.

Sadly, many Serling fans have never heard of The Loner, let alone watched it. In a way, though, that’s not surprising. It ran for only one season on CBS from September 1965 to March 1966.

It wasn’t even seen in reruns until the late 1990s, when cable’s TV Land rescued it from obscurity, at least briefly. Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and other vintage Westerns live on today on retro channels, but The Loner seems all but forgotten.

Which is really a shame. You don’t have to be a Zone fan to appreciate it. In fact, The Loner had no supernatural elements and was about as far removed from the fifth dimension as you can imagine. But it had one crucial thing in common with Serling’s signature series: his incisive writing and pointed social critiques.

And that may have helped spell its doom.

The Loner, which starred Lloyd Bridges as William Colton, a former Union officer wandering from town to town in the years after the Civil War, wasn’t your run-of-the-mill Western. You’ll see gunplay and other genre staples, but the problems that its characters faced were more likely to be psychological than physical. But Serling felt that CBS was pressing him to include more violence — and he resisted.

Reading the war of words that played out between him and CBS programming executive Michael Dann[1] can be frustrating for fans who wish the series could have continued for more than just 26 episodes. The two men seem to be talking past each other. It sounds like their respective visions for the show weren’t really that far off.

But Dann also expressed a desire for Serling to bring in other writers and function more as a script supervisor than as a writer. And when he did that, I think he inadvertently signed the show’s death warrant. Serling wasn’t about to take what he considered a serious insult lying down. As a self-described “pop-off,” he made his grievances public, which hardly endeared him to Dann. The Loner’s days were soon numbered.

Before it went off the air, though, Serling made sure to dramatize the poisonous effects of prejudice. In “The Homecoming of Lemuel Stove,” for example, Colton puts his life on the line to keep Stove (Brock Peters), a fellow ex-Yankee, from being lynched. In “Widow on the Evening Stage,” he confronts hatred and bigotry when protecting a Native American woman (Katherine Ross) whose white husband was killed.

There was a time when Serling fans interested in sampling the series had no real options. It wasn’t streaming anywhere (and it still isn’t), and it wasn’t on disc. That changed in 2016 when home-video company Shout! acquired the rights and put the series on DVD. As someone who for years had nothing but a bootleg set (20 episodes that someone recorded from TV Land), I was delighted to finally be able to buy a complete, official run of the series.

It retails for about $14 on Amazon. If you’re a Serling fan who also enjoys westerns, you won’t regret saddling up — and exploring the restless world of The Loner.

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Hope to see you in some corner of the fifth dimension soon!

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[1] Quoted extensively in Nick Parisi’s excellent “Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination” (2018)