Jack Nicholson's Final TV Appearance Was in This 57-Year-Old Western Show (2024)

For over five decades, actor Jack Nicholson has been the case study on how to appear effortlessly cool. Despite refusing to play by Hollywood's rules, Nicholson is as beloved an actor as they come, thanks in large part to his ability to ooze both charm and confidence. This skill has been on vivid display from the actor's earliest days as not a movie star, but a television performer.

Best remembered today for his performances in five-star classics like The Shining, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, As Good As It Gets, and so many, many more, Jack Nicholson's early television career has often (understandably) been overlooked. While it might not pack any legendary performances to rival that of his run on the silver screen, Nicholson's history in television is still one worth looking back on, especially in regard to how it ended on the set of the Western TV classic The Guns of Will Sonnett.

What Is The Guns of Will Sonnett About?

A Father Must Make Amends for the Sins of the Past While Searching the Old West for His Missing Son

A Western television series that ran on ABC from 1967 to 1969, The Guns of Will Sonnett entered production under the name of "Two Rode West." The series starred veteran character actor Walter Brennan as Will Sonnett, who, along with his grandson Jeff (played by Norman Jay "Dack" Rambo), are searching for Will's missing son, Jim.

The backstory to this classic TV Western was this: Jim disappeared at the age of 17, having grown tired of his father constantly never being home. A few years later, Will finds a baby boy on his doorstep with a letter introducing the child as Jim's son and explaining that this is Will's second chance to be the kind of father he failed to be for Jim.

Wanting to redeem himself, Will Sonnett takes the challenge on and raises Jeff as his own, pointing him in the right direction at all turns. But all of that is for naught when Jeff hears of his father Jim's legacy as a renowned gunfighter and sets off to find him. The only thing Will can do is agree to tag along to keep his grandson safe, and together, they set out on a journey across the Wild West to find Jim Sonnett.

More often than not, Will and Jeff arrive in a town or settlement shortly after Jim has already departed. From those townsfolk, Will and Jeff hear mixed messages about Jim, with some believing him to be a cold-blooded killer and others under the impression that he is the only man brave enough to stand up for what's right. As an onscreen character, Jim only appeared in a total of fourteen episodes, and while most of those were fleeting, he occasionally had a more substantial role to play.

By the end of The Guns of Will Sonnett's two-season run, Will and Jeff have come close many times to reuniting with Jim but only truly locate their missing family member in the series' final episode. After that, the three men agree to become lawmen in a small town, with Will serving as Sheriff and Jim and Jeff as his deputies.

What Was Jack Nicholson's Role in The Guns of Will Sonnett?

He Guest-Starred In Just One Episode

Prior to moseying on into town in The Guns of Will Sonnett, Jack Nicholson had spent the prior ten years trying to establish himself as an actor with a series of smaller performances in many Roger Corman movies like The Cry Baby Killer and The Little Shop of Horrors, as well as more than a few television roles.

While The Guns of Will Sonnett didn't capture as much of the public's imagination as other Western series like Gunsmoke or Bonanza, it still offered Jack Nicholson the opportunity to increase his notoriety by appearing as one of the series' wide-ranging guest stars that Will and Jeff meet along their journey that also includes such notable names as Charles Grodin, Cloris Leachman, Harry Dean Stanton, and even Jack Nicholson's future Easy Rider co-star (and director), Dennis Hopper.

In Nicholson's Season 1 episode, "A Son for a Son," he stars as Tom Murdock, a member of a farming family who takes Jeff and Will in when Jeff falls ill on the road. What Jeff and Will don't know is that Jim killed one of the Murdock brothers in a (fair) gunfight a short time earlier, and now the family's heartbroken and delusional matriarch is under the impression that Jeff is her deceased son. Likewise, what audiences (and perhaps Nicholson himself) didn't know at the time was that this would be this talented actor's final television appearance ever.

Why Did Jack Nicholson Never Return to Television Again Following The Guns of Will Sonnett?

He Went From an Afterthought on Television to Hollywood's Biggest Movie Star

To understand why The Guns of Will Sonnett became Jack Nicholson's final television role, we need to circle back to the beginning of his career and put it in the proper context. Nicholson arrived in California for the first time when he was just 13 years old to visit his sister. There, he took on a gig working as an office temp for animation directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera at the MGM Cartoon Studio. Impressed by his work ethic, Hanna and Barbera offered him an entry-level job as an animator, but he politely declined because, even back then, Jack Nicholson knew he wanted to be a world-famous actor.

To accomplish his dream, Jack Nicholson trained to become an actor with the Players Ring Theater, after which he began to book small roles on stage and TV. After debuting on NBC Matinee Theater in 1956 with a nothing role, Nicholson graduated to the big screen as part of the low-budget teen drama The Cry Baby Killer, directed by Roger Corman. For the next decade, Nicholson worked closely with the B-movie legend while also building up his television repertoire.

By the late 1960s, Jack Nicholson was disappointed with the little progress he had made in his career. Around that time, he considered embarking on a career behind the camera instead of in front of it. Looking to kickstart his career as a screenwriter, he wrote the screenplay for the countercultural acid filmThe Trip, which was directed by his longtime associate Roger Corman and starred Peter Fonda alongside Dennis Hopper. After reading the script, Fonda was impressed by Nicholson's work, and Dennis Hopper was too, so much so that both men wrote a similar-themed project in the form of Easy Rider.

When actor Rip Torn, who was originally cast in the role of George Hanson, dropped out of Easy Rider after a particularly violent disagreement with director Dennis Hopper, Fonda and Hopper reached out to Jack Nicholson to replace him. The rest, as they say, is history. The role of George Hanson earned Jack Nicholson his first-ever Oscar nomination, and from that point forward, Nicholson was a made man in Hollywood, boasting the type of star-wattage that meant he never had to be relegated to television again.

While Jack Nicholson's destiny was never meant to be contained by the confines of television, it's nonetheless appropriate that his TV career ended as an afterthought in a Western television series that has sadly been lost to time. Much like its former one-time guest star, The Guns of Will Sonnett deserves recognition for its place in television history. As Will Sonnett himself might say: