In The Texan, Calhoun played Bill Longley, a Confederate captain from the American Civil War who on his pinto, Domino, roams the American West, but stops to help people in need. A fast gun and the enemy of all lawbreakers, this "Robin Hood of the West" seems to appear nearly everywhere in the postwar years, not just in Texas. Often, the plots center around Longley helping an old friend or a relative of an old friend. Though known as a fearsome gunfighter, the fictional Bill Longley of The Texan is in no way the real Bill Longley. That Longley killed his first man in 1866, when he was 15, and was hanged in 1878 in Giddings in Lee County in Central Texas. A more accurate version of the real Longley is Douglas Kennedy's rendition in the syndicated series, Stories of the Century, starring and narrated by Jim Davis, and the first Western series to win an Emmy Award. The Texan offers several multipart episodes. In a four-parter, Longley portrayed the boss of a cattle drive; in another, he was a railroad construction supervisor. In still another, Longley pursued the bandit El Sombro in the fictitious corrupt community of Rio Nada. In this episode, Barbara Stuart made one of her three appearances as Poker Alice, an unlikely frontier gambler, the mother of seven children who had once been a dealer at Bob Ford's saloon in Creede, Colorado, but lived thereafter primarily in Deadwood and Sturgis, South Dakota. Calhoun's then-wife, Lita Baron, appeared in several episodes, including a three-parter.
Production notes
With Victor Orsatti, Calhoun formed Rorvic Productions to co-produce The Texan in partnership with Desilu Productions, the company founded by Lucille Ball and her first husband, Desi Arnaz. Then a neighbor of Orsatti's, Arnaz proposed the idea for The Texan. Episodes were budgeted at $40,000 each, with two segments filmed weekly at Desilu Studios. Despite the name, the program was not filmed in Texas, but at Pearl Flats in the Mohave Desert in Southern California. The Texan ran for only two seasons, but could have been extended for a third had Calhoun been willing to continue. However, he wanted to return to films. In the second half of the second season, The Texan was preceded on the CBS schedule by Kate Smith's return to network television, her unsuccessful The Kate Smith Show. The first season, sponsored by Viceroy, is considered of better quality because CBS reused in the second season some of the material and footage from the first season. After the 78-episode run, Calhoun returned to starring and co-starring in "B" Westerns and making occasional television appearances. Louis L'Amour wrote teleplays for several episodes, but 35 writers were hired for the series, with more than a dozen directors. One of the directors, George Archainbaud, a native of Paris, died during the run of The Texan. Other directors were Erle C. Kenton, who began his career in 1914 with silent films, and Edward Ludwig, a native of Russia. The Texan faced competition in its first season from another Western, The Restless Gun, an NBC series. Though The Restless Gun finished in eighth place in the ratings in its first season, The Texan surpassed it in the 1958-1959 season to finish at number 15 while The Restless Gun fell out of the top 30 and ended its run in 1959. The Texan then also fell out of the top 30 the following season. In the 1960-1961 television season, rebroadcasts of The Texan ran on ABC daytime opposite CBS's As the World Turns and NBC's Make Room for Daddy, starring Danny Thomas.
On November 18, 2008, Timeless Media Group released a 10-disc best-of set entitled The Texan, which features seventy of the original seventy-eight episodes.
