Jim Davis was an American actor, best known for his roles in television Westerns. In his later career, he became famous as Jock Ewing in the CBS primetime soap opera Dallas, a role he continued until he was too ill from multiple myeloma to perform.

Television Westerns are programs with settings in the later half of the 19th century in the American Old West, Western Canada and Mexico during the period from about 1860 to the end of the so-called "Indian Wars". More recent entries in the Western genre have used the neo-Western subgenre, placing events in the modern day, or the space Western subgenre but still draw inspiration from the outlaw attitudes prevalent in traditional Western productions.