50 best television shows set across the United States
By Sundi Rose
Nebraska: The Young Riders
The premise: Fans of the 1988 movie Young Guns will find the plot of this show very familiar, and producers agreed. They sued ABC and the show because it was so similar, but it still went on for three seasons. The plots are almost identical: a group of young Pony Express Riders, some of whom you will recognize from history and from the prior films. The show chronicles the adventures of the group in the years before the Civil War.
The main characters included some famous historical names such as Kid (as in Billy the), William F. Cody, James Butler Hickock, and Jesse James. The show didn’t do very well in the ratings, despite our fascination with Westerns, and was canceled in 1992.
The setting: The series is set in the then Nebraska Territory’s Sweetwater Station. Because it was a pretty typical contribution to the Western genre, it looks like a lot of other, less successful shows taking on the same sorts of stories.
The most Nebraska thing about it: The town in which it’s set is a real town in Nebraska, serving as a railway stop between Omaha and Denver. The community was named for a nearby spring that pioneers noted for the clean drinking water. It also appeared in other works of fiction such as Willa Cathers’ A Lost Lady.