The Cartwright men had various love interests, but none stuck around and many died or left town. Ben Cartwright was widowed three times hence his three sons by three different mothers. It wasn’t safe to be a woman around the Ponderosa. However, Landon and Greene made it known that any other male leads introduced couldn’t be Cartwrights, lest the network decide to summarily swap out any of the lead actors with another “family member.” When Roberts did leave after Season 6, none of the additional male leads (like David Canary, who played Candy in 91 episodes) were adult Cartwrights. The producers temporarily introduced the very popular Guy Williams (TV’s Zorro) as cousin Will Cartwright after he was featured in five episodes, Roberts decided to stay and Williams was shuffled off (don’t worry about him he quickly became everyone’s favorite space dad, Dr. Roberts wasn’t happy with the grind of network TV (at the time, the show was on a 34 episode-per-season model, as opposed to the 22-episode model that broadcast would settle into in later years) he also had concerns about his character and considered departing. When the show launched, the focus was on Ben Cartwright (Lorne Greene), and his three sons: Adam (Pernell Roberts), Hoss (Dan Blocker), and Little Joe (Michael Landon). A sequence was actually filmed for the pilot episode that had the cast singing the song, but it was cut. Johnny Cash played a version containing words of his own. In fact, it had multiple sets of lyrics, one even penned by series star Lorne Greene. You wouldn’t know if from the opening credits or the version shown in syndication, but the theme song did have lyrics. The longest-running scripted primetime series of all-time is The Simpsons, which at this writing is still going. It’s the second longest-running western, behind only Gunsmoke in the genre. At 14 seasons that spanned from 1959 to 1972, Bonanza remains one of the longest-running primetime shows of all time.
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