Klondike (TV series)

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Klondike
Format	Western
Starring	Ralph Taeger James Coburn Joi Lansing Mari Blanchard L.Q. Jones
Country of origin	United States
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	17
Production
Running time	30 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	NBC
Picture format	Black and white
Original run	October 10, 1960 – February 13, 1961
External links
IMDb profile

Klondike is an 17-episode NBC half-hour Western television series set during 1897 in the gold rush town of Skagway in the Alaskan Klondike region, starring Ralph Taeger and James Coburn, with supporting roles for Joi Lansing as Goldie and Mari Blanchard as Kathy O'Hara. The series premiered on October 10, 1960, and ran until February 13, 1961.^[1]It faced stiff competition from The Danny Thomas Show on CBS and the second half of the first-season detective series Surfside 6 starring Troy Donahue on ABC. Klondike followed Dale Robertson's Tales of Wells Fargo on the NBC schedule.^[2]

Taeger played the "good guy" Mike Halliday, described by one observer as "Clint Walker without the charisma", and Coburn portrayed the con man Jeff Durain. When Klondike did not attract a large audience, NBC cancelled the show but shifted Taeger and Coburn to play detectives in Mexico in the short-lived Acapulco series. Klondike was related to the hour-long 1959-1960 ABC series The Alaskans starring Roger Moore, Jeff York, and Dorothy Provine, also set in the port city of Skagway and during the 1890s.^[3] Klondike should not be confused with a 1981 miniseries, Tales of the Klondike, based on short stories of author Jack London.^[4]

Various episodes of Klondike were directed by Sam Peckinpah and William Conrad, later Frank Cannon on CBS's detective series Cannon. Supporting roles were played by Western tough guy L.Q. Jones, a native Texan as Joe Teel,^[5] and by Karl Swenson, a recognized character actor of Swedish descent in two different roles.^[6]

In the debut episode, the characters rush to Alaska to search for gold. Other episodes included "The Golden Burro" with Edgar Buchanan about a burro who could find and dig for gold; "Bathouse Justice", in which a bathhouse serves as a courtroom in a murder case; "Sure Thing, Men" in which the group seeks a mining site only to run afoul of an old sourdough; "88 Keys to Trouble", in which someone releases all the inmates from the jail; "Saints and Stickups" in which a person of apparent moral bearing robs a stagecoach, and "Swing Your Partner", in which a group comes to town and dances the night away. In the series finale, some members of the town are held hostage for their gold. The others work to free them to salvage the treasure for which they had all labored so diligently.^[1]

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