Finding Comfort in Dodge City

Opinion Columnist

By Mary Keyes Rogers | Aug. 9, 2025

Am I the only person who didn’t realize that “Get the heck out of Dodge” is a Gunsmoke reference? I had no idea. As a girly-girl when I was a kid, westerns were not my thing at all. Unbeknownst to me, the TV show ran for 22 seasons on CBS, with 635 episodes originally airing between 1955 and 1975. I guess somebody was watching.

Now, here I am, 75 years after the first episode aired, and I’m hooked. I am hooked and comforted by Gunsmoke.

The world, or at least my world, has become a disheartening place that I find to be… uncomfortable, and I do need comfort. We all do. We seek comfort like toddlers sucking their thumbs; we self-soothe, as child development experts call it. Regularly, we need to escape our day and reach for our own unique mix of self-soothing or self-medicating with whiskey, weed, or maybe some waffles. And yes, for many of us, television reruns.

Gunsmoke has become my happy place, like familiar comfort food, but for my eyeballs. After resisting a friend’s repeated urges to give Gunsmoke a try, I am now fully on board and truly understand the renewed popularity this old show is experiencing; I’ve become an evangelist.

For me, the timing was perfect. Having binged Justified, Deadwood, and Yellowstone, my appetite was whetted for dusty streets, hired guns, and saloon girls. So I started watching the black-and-white episodes on Pluto TV.

Why do I find Gunsmoke so appealing and soothing? 1870s Dodge City is wild yet predictable. Wild because pioneering men or families (rarely a single woman) risk everything for a better life than they left behind, and some newcomers mistakenly believe Kansas is beyond the reach of the law.

Predictable, not because nothing bad ever happens. Quite the opposite. Bad and terrible things do happen, but no matter the storyline, whether it’s a stagecoach robbery, murder, cattle rustling, a bar fight turned deadly, or an attempt to skip town with bad poker debts, you know that the citizens and their sole embodiment of law enforcement, U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon, will be there—reliably calm and ready to see justice done. Often, the Marshal can’t legally lock up the bad guy, so instead, he tells them it’s time “to get out of Dodge.”

Wrongs will be righted. The family farm will be saved, the murderer hanged, the traveler will find his missing child, and the robbers will be brought to justice. The townspeople will come together, supporting the victims as the credits roll.

Another reason to love Gunsmoke is that, besides the great regular cast, episodes often feature future Hollywood stars like Burt Reynolds, Bette Davis, Cloris Leachman, George Kennedy, Charles Bronson, Jodie Foster, Ron Howard, Harrison Ford, and William Shatner.

And the writing is outstanding. The stories are engaging, and the characters are complex, creating very intelligent television rather than relying on tired old tropes. Life becomes quite frightening in Dodge. There’s no confusion about who is good or bad, or what the right thing to do is.

Gunsmoke’s heroes—the Marshal, his deputies Chester, and later Festus, Doc Adams, and Miss Kitty—along with the townspeople, look out for and respect one another, and they sacrifice when necessary to help a damsel in distress or feed a hungry family. They consistently act with concern and kindness.

Amid the horror of Traverse City’s Walmart tragedy, the parking lot drama featured many real-life heroes who stood up to the perpetrator, armed with a gun or shopping carts, and several who bravely stood with them, creating a crowd effect to show that this show was over. Law enforcement arrived and took the “bad guy” into custody. EMS and firefighters offered medical care to the victims and transported them to the hospital.

As awful as it was, the “stabbing story” ended with a degree of comfort for all of us, that our fellow citizens and local government institutions responded precisely as we might hope in such an awful circumstance. Walmart’s management made operational business decisions that were based on human kindness and understanding. While the victims’ recovery will take time, Traverse City has plenty of reasons to feel both proud and grateful.

Gunsmoke paints Dodge City with fairness, decency, and justice. Today’s bad guys are not so simple, but there’s comfort to be found in any city where the good guys do the right thing.

Mary Rogers is a 25-year resident of Traverse City and a freelance writer, with a husband and two grown children.