Westerns are dead. So is half-hour drama. And family shows seem to be getting there. Maybe that’s why “The Rifleman” seems so appealing in DVD release from MPI Home Video. “The Rifleman: Volume 4” is built not around the fast-firing weapon of the title, but around the principled life of weapon-wielder Chuck Connors, a likable pro baseballer-basketballer turned actor.

Connors is cast, of course, as a widower – all the dads were back when westerns were big — and he puts his relationship with tween son Johnny Crawford above all. Like so many action heroes from Bruce Lee to Billy Jack, Connors’ strapping Lucas McCain is an ordinary man who abhors violence. But the bad guys just keep pushing him toooo far.

As Lucas tries to run his ranch, he’s forever having to help clean up a New Mexico town overseen by an aging marshal. Trouble-causers arrive regularly, some specifically targeting Lucas to settle old scores, others being dastardly just because. Each leanly detailed incident becomes an opportunity for Lucas to explain the world’s moral underpinnings to curious son Mark, who occasionally inspires humor in trying to marry off his dad to attractive women (“She rides a horse like a man, too!”).

Stars-to-be are frequently seen in MPI’s four-DVD collections (which are not season sets but compilations of 20 episodes each). In the fourth box of mostly first-season episodes, Dan Blocker appears, pre-“Bonanza,” as the goofy brother of Mark’s proposed match, while “Man From U.N.C.L.E.” lead Robert Vaughn plays a dangerously green young sheriff. The latter gets sage advice from Lucas about keeping “a firm hand on a slack rein. That way, you got control and no one feels the bit in his mouth.”

There’s rain-making, bounty-hunting, bigotry-set-straight, and even a women’s suffrage battle. But “The Rifleman” is remembered best as a sincere, nonsentimental portrait of a strong but tender, God-fearing man trying to raise his boy right under trying circumstances. That’s substance that never goes out of style.