Moses Gunn, Katherine Cannon, and Merlin Olsen as the main cast of 'Father Murphy.'
The Big Picture It's no secret that Michael Landon had a major hand in running Little House on the Prairie. The series wouldn't have been the same without him, both in front of and behind the camera. But even while working on Little House, Landon had other projects brewing. One such venture was a Western drama series he proposed to NBC in the early 1980s.
Though it's often confused as a Little House spin-off, Father Murphy has nothing to do with Olsen's previous series. Rather than playing a farmer and mill worker as he did in Little House, this time Olsen played an 1870s frontiersman who poses as a priest in Golden Hill to save a few orphan boys from being sent to the local workhouse.
"The thing that killed us was moving over to Sunday night opposite 60 Minutes," series star Merlin Olsen told UPI in 1982. "We had ratings that were very healthy -- in the 30s. Then we moved, and when you lose an audience it's much more difficult to get them back than it was to pick them up in the first place.
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