The Western genre has its fair share of traditional heroes, but the genre is better known for providing us with some of the most iconic antiheroes on both the big and small screen. It’s arguably these figures that make the genre so appealing to film and television fans looking for authentic characters with moral ambiguity and emotional depth.

Since the days of Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, the so-called heroes in Western movies have tended to be just as terrifying as the villains. But the first antiheroes in TV Westerns actually predate Eastwood’s iconic character from Sergio Leone ’s Dollars trilogy. Indeed, two of the characters on this list first appeared onscreen in the late 1950s.

The attraction of antiheroes is that, unlike straightforward heroes, they’re fallible and

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