The theatrical trailer for Delmer Daves’ episodic 1958 Western, Cowboy, opens in black and white and features a solitary, seated figure impatiently clicking through the channels of a television, all of which show the same generic Western situation of a posse riding through a rocky, dusty, and ill-defined landscape: “Pardner, I don't mind sayin’ I'm plum sick of childish Westerns.” The trailer then cuts to the figure of Jack Lemmon, in cowboy attire, introducing the film he co-stars in: “it's really the West.” Such a playful approach to the advertising of a Hollywood film is not that unusual by the late 1950s, but this trailer also pushes some of the key ways in which we are meant to receive and respond to the film in question, as well as its adversarial relationship to television.

Cowboy was made on the cusp of the great boom in the television Western that reached its peak in the early 1960s, a shift of medium and scale that highlighted the mundane, domestic, serialized, largely historically comfortable and generic characteristics of the form that were soon to be busted apart, or hyperbolically restaged, in the revisionist Westerns of directors such as Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, and Robert Altman. Although Daves’ film is not a revisionist Western in this sense—its aim is more circumspect, less aggressive, and clearly attentive to the existing legacies and histories of the West—it is plainly being promoted as something of an antidote to the redundancies of the serialized Western and the form of television itself. This trailer also highlights Cowboy's “adult,” realistic, naturalistic, “diurnal,” and large-scale interventionist ambitions in relation to the genre. Although it aims to highlight the workaday actualities of cowboy life, its approach and setting are distinct from the sanitized backlots, domesticity, interiorized and clapboard main-street dramas of the TV Western.

In this trailer Cowboy is not promoted in terms of its director—Daves was a respected figure by this stage, but hardly a household name—and it doesn't make too much of the presence of Glenn Ford in a starring role, either, although he was then one of the biggest box-office attractions in the world.