First off, as others have suggested, it is necessary to think of the half-hour shows and the hour-long episodes as two separate shows.
There's a number of reasons why they went to an hour, but it wasn't that NBC suddenly acquired the series in 1961. The show had aired on NBC since its debut in 1957. By the third season, the declining quality of the show forced a change in executive producers. Dale Robertson, who owned half interest in the show, brought in Earle Lyon in 1960. The studio and network quickly saw a rise in positive fan mail praising the improvements in the show. The trend in dramas (including Westerns) was moving to hour-long formats, and NBC felt "Wells Fargo" should follow suit.
With the enlarged time slot, they decided to move Hardie from a traveling road agent and started a format where he was semi-retired and owning a ranch in California. The result was a Western that was neither fish nor fowl, with Hardie spending half his time reacting to things happening in town and the other half doing occasional jobs for Wells Fargo.
This happened at the same time that Revue was merging with Universal Studios, who weren't happy with production costs. Universal made the call to cancel the show.
Now that the "inside baseball" explanation's made, the original half-hour shows were just right. Much like Jim Davis on "Stories of the Century", Dale Robertson seemed to be in the right place at the right time to apprehend every bad guy in the wild West, and the half-hour format resulted in tight scripts and good performances.
The hour-long color shows were OK, but they'd have been better off sticking with what brought them as far as they did.
There's a number of reasons why they went to an hour, but it wasn't that NBC suddenly acquired the series in 1961. The show had aired on NBC since its debut in 1957. By the third season, the declining quality of the show forced a change in executive producers. Dale Robertson, who owned half interest in the show, brought in Earle Lyon in 1960. The studio and network quickly saw a rise in positive fan mail praising the improvements in the show. The trend in dramas (including Westerns) was moving to hour-long formats, and NBC felt "Wells Fargo" should follow suit.
With the enlarged time slot, they decided to move Hardie from a traveling road agent and started a format where he was semi-retired and owning a ranch in California. The result was a Western that was neither fish nor fowl, with Hardie spending half his time reacting to things happening in town and the other half doing occasional jobs for Wells Fargo.
This happened at the same time that Revue was merging with Universal Studios, who weren't happy with production costs. Universal made the call to cancel the show.
Now that the "inside baseball" explanation's made, the original half-hour shows were just right. Much like Jim Davis on "Stories of the Century", Dale Robertson seemed to be in the right place at the right time to apprehend every bad guy in the wild West, and the half-hour format resulted in tight scripts and good performances.
The hour-long color shows were OK, but they'd have been better off sticking with what brought them as far as they did.