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.