I am by no means an expert on TV Westerns. (Actually, you could put “I am by no means an expert” on my headstone because I’m not an expert on anything; I’m just really good at running my mouth.) But I have watched all of The Big Valley and Bonanza, and just about every episode of Gunsmoke thanks to my father’s latest binge watching habits, and I’ve noticed something.

Women in the old west were pretty weak. The plot typically calls for them to be at the mercy of something, usually a man. The man is either a bad man who makes everyone miserable or a man she loves who is either a bad man who makes everyone miserable or a good man who makes terrible life choices.

I honestly think the latter makes my eye twitch more.

There’s this insinuation that all a woman wants is to have a man and that she will put up with anything to have one, even if that man is garbage. The number of times I’ve heard, “You have to do X because I am your husband,” or “because you love me” or “because you don’t have a choice.” I would be a widow. Men outnumber women in the Old West. I will find me a new one that does not try my nerves to such an extent.

Which brings me to my next observation.

Men did outnumber women back in the Old West because it was a rough life. It wasn’t for everyone. You had to be pretty tough to survive out there. So, it stands to reason that most of the women out there would be a little more involved in self-preservation. They probably wouldn’t be as tolerant of their man’s bullshit because finding another one would pose no challenge.

Also, women would have to be tougher to survive out there, period. Depending on a man wouldn’t be the best strategy because if your man is shit or if he dies -which was probably pretty likely, especially in a TV Western- a woman would be shit out of luck. And that has been the plot of more than one of these episodes. The women are always looking for a man to save them.

I find this most egregious when it comes to the saloon girls working at the Long Branch on Gunsmoke. We all know what their business really is -wink wink nudge nudge- and the fact is that in order to survive that lifestyle, you had to be a helluva lot tougher than the men. Looking for a fella to save you wasn’t going to work out in your favor and being pushed around by the clientele was bad for business. Miss Kitty was a bad ass broad, but I feel like she should have shot a lot more men.

Which brings me to the flip side. Sort of.

If the women weren’t weak, they were wily. They were plotting, cunning, and conniving, using their feminine wiles to get what they wanted. It frequently manifests as a woman pitting two men against each other, or using a man as a proxy to enact either vengeance or self-enrichment. These women are tough, in their way, and that’s a bad thing. Being tough and resilient is at odds with femininity, at least in the minds of cowboys and the men who wrote them.

Of course, there are exceptions. Miss Kitty and Victoria Barkley are notable in this respect. Both women are fiery, independent, and not apt to take shit from any man. Victoria Barkley was skilled with a whip and even though I thought Miss Kitty should have shot more men, that didn’t mean she didn’t have a gun behind the bar and that she didn’t use it. I also saw her whip a man with a parasol once. I wouldn’t cross either one of those women.

I suppose they didn’t want independent, strong women to have too much representation in the Old West.

The ladies might get ideas.

It’s a common trope on a cop show.

The good guys have caught the bad guy, but the bad guy gets off on a technicality. The good guys are then forced to watch their bad guy walk free to create more of their brand of mayhem, usually while giving an impassioned version of “I’m going to nail that guy if it’s the last thing I do,” a lyric that fits into almost any melody a fictional super cop wants to sing.

Naturally, since we’re on the side of our good guys, we’re incensed with them. The justice system is clearly flawed/broken if it would allow a bad guy to walk free, a bad guy that we know is a bad guy because our good guys said so. We’re confident that our cops will see that justice is done no matter what those fancy attorneys and incompetent judges do. And, of course, they do. Just as we knew they would.

It’s a clever trick of copaganda.

“Technicality”. It makes it sound like someone didn’t dot an I or cross a T. And while it is accurate -the defendant wasn’t found not guilty, they were released because of a technical error- it’s also deceptive. The shows tend to gloss over how these “technicalities” are part of due process.

Due process is that pesky part of the Constitution that guarantees a person is granted certain rights and protections when dealing with the legal system. These are guaranteed rights that apply to everyone, not just citizens, not just the innocent. Due process covers such things as habeas corpus, the right to remain silent, the right to counsel, the right to cross examine a witness, the right to a speedy trial, the right to access to the evidence, etc.

Cop shows love to make defense attorneys look morally questionable. After all, they’re defending the bad guys. They also love to make them look sneaky when they use these “technicality tricks”. While they gloss over the nature of the technicalities, they also gloss over the role of the defense attorney. Their job is to defend their client. Part of that defense is to make sure that their client’s rights aren’t being violated.

An episode of Hawaii Five-O deals with the consequences of due process in an interesting way.

In the sixth season episode “Mother’s Deadly Helper”, an accused man has his case dismissed because the prosecution can’t produce a needed witness to proceed with their case. The defense attorney asks for a dismissal based on the fact that the repeated continuations that the state’s attorney has asked for violates his client’s right to a speedy trial.

It feels like a miscarriage of justice because we learn later that this guy is a hitman. But it’s not because even hitmen are entitled to their rights.

His freedom is short-lived as a vigilante snipes him as soon as he leaves the courthouse. The disgruntled citizen in this episode is fed up with “soft-hearted judges” letting criminal walk. The “soft-hearted judges” in question are committing the unforgivable acts of upholding the rights of individuals.

In the context of cop shows, it feels egregious to allow these bad guys the same rights as the innocent folks because what we want to see is our good guys putting them behind bars for good.

I suppose it feels egregious in the context of the real world, too. Especially when it seems like those rights favor a select group of the population.

But we all have them.

Even fictional bad guys.

For episode 72 of Book ’em, Danno, I watched the sixth season Hawaii Five-O episode “One Born Every Minute” in which a brilliant con man uses a beautiful blonde to rope in married, middle aged men to swindle money from them in an elaborate diamond buying scheme. The con man targets these men because their married nature precludes them from going to the cops once they’ve discovered they’ve been had because they don’t want their wives to find out that they were in the market to cheat.

Which is funny considering cheating was almost normalized on TV during that time. It’s understood that married, middle aged men are going to cheat on their wives as soon as a pretty young thing gives them the opportunity, and not just at the office or on business trips, but even while they’re on vacation with their wives waiting in their hotel room while they’re off cavorting, like two of the swindle victims in the episode.

The heterosexual marriage narrative depicted in television is that by middle age and a couple of decades of marriage, the wives are used up, miserable nags, and the husbands are misunderstood, hen-pecked, and most importantly, still desirable to gorgeous young women, so it’s only logical that they would step outside of the confines of their marriage to experience that freedom. Most of the time, there’s no indication that the men want anything but a little something-something on the side -after all, to leave their wife is to leave the comfort of their needs being consistently met. Girlfriends are for sexy times; wives are for laundry. Yet, there’s also enough concern for consequences (I’d call it shame, but baby, that ain’ it) that these men don’t want their wives to find out about any of these indiscretions.

What a delightful dichotomy that lands husband after husband in hot water, particularly on cop shows.

What an odd expectation of marital life to set. It was inevitable that husbands would cheat on their wives and wives would tolerate it. It was inevitable that husbands and wives would eventually hate each other. It’s a natural progression of marital bliss after the honeymoon period. In a society that puts emphasis on marriage -especially at that time when a woman’s life was forcibly tied to a man (unable to get credit, open a bank account, etc. without a man’s signature)- can you imagine watching your favorite show and being told that’s the life you should not only expect but be grateful for? Hell, week after week on The Honeymooners, Ralph Cramden threatened to send his wife Alice to the moon while she seemed to barely tolerate his existence for the sake of his paycheck, and that was considered to be a normal marriage. Wild.

Of course, not every television marriage was depicted this way. Darrin and Samantha Stephens had a pretty loving marriage on Bewitched; Carol and Mike Brady are both marriage and parenting goals; even some of the married couples that passed through Hawaii Five-O, criminal and law abiding, seemed to have decent relationships. But when The Addams Family exists in direct challenge to everything suburban normal and that includes a loving marriage with spouses who are openly affectionate and infatuated with each other even after two kids and many years, that speaks some volumes. Practically shouts, really.

Watching these shows now, at this distance, with the depiction of the casual philandering and the general ball-and-chain attitude, it’s just fascinating that this was put forth as an ideal. A norm. This was the future every girl should dream of and every man should subject himself to.

Enjoy your marital bliss.