Actor David McLean was certainly no pretty-boy - And, he was almost pushing 40 when he took on the role of Tate, the handicapped gunslinger/bounty-hunter of the Old West.
I found Tate to be one of the very few TV Westerns of its time that actually had a genuine gritty edge to the various tales that it told in the 13 episodes of its one and only season (1960).
I think it was really too bad that Tate wasn't given a chance to at least run for a second season. This was a show that seemed to have a lot of potential. But, I guess that, at this point, the TV audience's interest in Westerns had waned considerably by the time 1960 had rolled around.
Personally, I found a majority of the episodes of Tate to be very intense and quite riveting in the nature of their story-lines.
And, of course, it was David McLean, as the title character, who was the driving force behind the gritty and keen realism of the show. McLean was certainly a man well-suited for his part.
Tate, a veteran of the Civil War (where an injury rendered his left arm unusable), was a true loner and something of a drifter who, following the war, headed out on the road using his remarkable talents as an ace-gunfighter to earn a living and bring some semblance of justice to the Old West.
Filmed in b&w, all of the 13 action-packed episodes of Tate had a running time of just 30 minutes.
