The entire series run of Gunsmoke is on Pluto TV. 20 seasons, 635 episodes

I agree Merton episodes were great. However, some of those earlier episodes were written by a woman, Kathleen Hite ? These episodes had a woman as the main character and were not nearly as good.

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According to Marshall Trimble, a historian and vice president of the Wild West History Association, character Matt Dillon shot 407 people on Gunsmoke.

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Fascinating facts about Gunsmoke

While there were many great episodes in color, the black and white ones just felt more like a real western.
Talk about rewatchable. I found the Gunsmoke channel several years ago and let it run constantly for months. If somebody wanted to watch something else they could, but then the TV went right back to Gunsmoke. Finally, everyone else here had had enough and that ended.

"Gunsmoke" is pretty darned sensational in my view. Over such a long run, it naturally had its ups and downs. I thought the very first season leaned a bit too much on reworking scripts from the radio series, and some of the episodes were a tad too static. But by third season, it was a brilliant, well-oiled machine, putting out tight, top-notch episodes. A superb run, going on for several seasons.

When it first went to an hour in 1961, it was initially a little off-balance, with stories being too dragged out. But they got things quickly together, and some of the 1962-64 episodes are just incredible... although sometimes awfully bleak, grim, and downbeat. The series started waning a little in the mid-1960s period, with its last b&w season (65-66) and first color season (66-67). But then, surprisingly, it actually picks up again with a lot of rather robust episodes around the 1967-68 period. After that, the furor over violence in television took hold, and neutered the series considerably as it continued into the 1970s. Still decent episodes here and there, especially around 1971 or so, but its glory days were clearly over.