The Rifleman is about to come on television, so I’m going to have to keep this blog short. Now please don’t tell me that you don’t know about The Rifleman because everyone should be exposed to Lucus McCain and his trick rifle…this is something everyone agrees on…except my daughter.
“Don’t go letting my boys watch The Rifleman this summer when they are with you,” she cautioned as she dropped the boys for a week’s visit.
“But the Rifleman is so wholesome. Chuck Conners plays Lucas McCain and uses that rifle effortlessly to take care of the bad guys. And all without blood and gore,” I was truly distraught. The Rifleman is my favorite.
“Alright, but not a steady diet of it, okay? I don’t want the boys to start playing at shooting,” she conceded reluctantly as she drove away.
I don’t understand it. People say they want to be entertained and then they overlook the best entertainment. I don’t need vampires or singing idols or romantic couples (of 30 or more) to keep me entertained. I object to demons which scare me to death and I also don’t get a thrill out of shows where people try to survive in the wilderness or argue with each other for fun.
I do like shows where the good guy comes out on top (with some shooting and body count, I admit.) I like shows with a mystery and I absolutely adore old movies (talkies, only please). Most of the programming I want to watch is blood free (well, except for Code Black, which is kind of medically loaded), and as I said, the good guys may not be wearing the white hats, but they do finish first.
If I’m going to sit through a movie, it needs to be a little supernatural without being “gargoyles stepping off the buildings to eat us” scary. I’ve discovered that the higher a woman’s heel in a movie or television show, the more likely she is to be a person who will go for the jugular, and I’m definitely a low-heeled sort of person. I also have learned that while mini-series can be interesting, they frequently stretch out and last too long. I want to know why that dome fell right now or why those animals suddenly attacked without too many episodes. I don’t have the patience to wait too long!
That brings us back to television when my grandsons are here. I know they like to watch Modern Marvels and Paw Patrol, but I didn’t think they really paid much attention to my programming, so I could watch The Rifleman, right? That is, I didn’t think it mattered until their mother came to pick them up.
“As you can see, I took good care of them,” I bragged as I was packing up clothes and toys. “I didn’t expose them to anything bad and I flatter myself I may have introduced them to some new pieces of fine entertainment.”
At that exact moment, the older boy stepped out of the bathroom, where he had been brushing his teeth. Dropping the toothbrush to his right hip in an exact replica of Lucas McCain with his rifle, he fired several shots (complete with sound effects) directly at his brother.
My daughter turned to me and said, “Lucas McCain is out.” And she just gave me that look which told me that any further watching of The Rifleman when her boys are there will be at midnight, deep in a closet! It’s not too bad, though, I still have plenty of good television to watch when they are there…Paw Patrol, Curious George, Dinosaur Train and on really good days, even a little bit of Sid the Science Kid! Entertainment is all relative, right?
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