Review of Bonanza

Am I the only person who considers Bonanza to be the WORST TV western ever? (Then again, please note that I consider DANCES WITH WOLVES to be the worst western movie ever!) Maybe I'm crazy and the rest of the world is right. Maybe I'm like John the Baptist, a voice crying out in the wilderness, trying to tell the truth when everyone else refuses to listen. All I know is that, while I may be the biggest TV western buff who ever lived, even as a kid I smelled a rat in Bonanaza. Though it was one of the first color westerns shown on a network, the color looked so washed out I'd rather it had been in black and white. It was supposed to be a kind of epic on a big scale, but most of the scenes could have been shot in my back yard, at least during the opening seasons. I thought that the comedy interplay between Hoss and Little Joe was embarrassing, not funny, and that Lorne Greene came off as pompous and pretentious rather than convincingly patriarchal. Adam I kind of liked, though he disappeared fast. Everything struck me as corny and sentimental. And as for it being in any way 'original,' the first episode I ever tried to watch (when it was still on Saturday evenings at 7:30, eastern time) was a total rip off of the great movie western High Noon. How much more I liked The Big Valley, in which there was a great deal of believable conflict between the brothers. Or better still High Chapparal, one of the most underrated of TV westerns, with on-location shooting in Old Tucson that really did give it an authentic western look and epic scale, and had Leif Ericson as a father figure who was flawed and fallible and as such human and believable in a way Pa Cartwright never was - for me, at least.