Gunsmoke
Matt Gets It
TV Flash files “Matt Gets It” as the hour the catalog opens — Gunsmoke (1955–1975) on CBS, season 1, episode 1, aired 1955-09-10, 30 min.
From the desk
How this hour is filed
This leaf is S01E01: listed hour 1 of 635 in the Gunsmoke guide, first listed hour of season 1. It aired 1955-09-10 (30 min). No earlier hour is listed in this guide. Next is “Hot Spell” (S01E02). Broadcast log — titles and dates, not a plot bible.
Radio muscle finds a TV body. The marshal is mortal in hour one; that is the contract.
Catalog log
Broadcast listing — not a TV Flash recap.
Matt is critically wounded while attempting to arrest super-fast gunman Dan Grat. Grat runs rampant in Dodge while Matt recovers, but is unpleasantly surprised when the recovered marshal challenges him again.
Viewer FAQ
Where does Matt Gets It sit in the Gunsmoke guide?
S01E01 is listed hour 1 of 635 — first listed hour of season 1, season 1 episode 1.
When did Gunsmoke S01E01 air?
Matt Gets It aired 1955-09-10 and is listed at 30 minutes.
Where should I start?
Start with the 1955 opener, where the marshal is not invincible. Then sample a later guest-star hour rather than marching through hundreds of titles in order.
In the series
Why this series still plays
Twenty seasons of Dodge as a civic appointment: a marshal who can lose, a chorus instead of gadgets, and adult-western hours that treat a gunfight as a verdict. Longevity here was weather, not catalog padding — weekly public work with dust still on the boots.
September 1955, CBS: a marshal takes a bullet in the first hour and the adult western stops being a kid’s hat commercial. Gunsmoke had already lived on radio, with a different voice in the badge. Television wanted a face the lens could trust. The lore still pours like bar whiskey — John Wayne pointing at James Arness, William Conrad left on the airwaves, a casting fight that was really a medium fight. Radio-to-TV is never a reprint. It is a negotiation about whose body gets to mean the law.
Filed against
- James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon
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- Amanda Blake as Miss Kitty Russell
Amanda Blake’s Miss Kitty Russell ran Dodge City’s Long Branch with red-haired steel on Gunsmoke — saloon diplomacy as weekly moral court. Longevity made her western TV’s most reliable soft power. TV Flash files her as the original…
- Milburn Stone as Doc Adams
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- Dennis Weaver as Chester Goode
Dennis Weaver’s Chester Goode was Gunsmoke’s limp and loyalty — chorus, not gadget, in Dodge City’s weekly moral court. Twenty seasons of adult western that treated a gunfight as a verdict, James Arness as a marshal the camera could…
- Ken Curtis as Festus Haggen
Ken Curtis’s Festus Haggen is Gunsmoke’s later chorus — Dodge City as a weekly moral court, a marshal who can lose, adult-western hours that treat a gunfight as a verdict. Twenty seasons of civic work with dust on the boots. On TV Flash…