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Maverick (TV series)

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Maverick is a comedy-western television series created by Roy Huggins that ran from September 22, 1957 to July 8, 1962 on ABC.

The series starred James Garner as an adventurous gambler roaming the Old West named Bret Maverick (1957-1960) and Jack Kelly as his brother Bart Maverick (1957-1962). The show captivated the country, immediately launching 29-year-old Garner's career into the stratosphere. Kelly was brought in after eight episodes when the producers realized that it took over a week to shoot a single show, so that he and Garner could rotate as the series lead using two separate crews (while occasionally appearing together). Arguably the five most famous individual episodes of the series remain "Shady Deal At Sunny Acres," "Gun-Shy" (a spoof of Gunsmoke), "The Saga of Waco Wiliams" (which also drew the largest viewership of the series), "Duel At Sundown" (with Clint Eastwood), and "According to Hoyle" (the first appearance of Diane Brewster as roguish Samantha Crawford, a role she'd played earlier in an episode of another western TV series called Cheyenne). Many episodes are humorous while others are deadly serious, and in addition to purely original scripts, producer Huggins drew upon works by writers as disparate as Louis Lamour and Robert Louis Stevenson to give the series its surprising breadth and scope. The Maverick brothers never stopped travelling, and the show was as likely to be set on a riverboat or in New Orleans as in a western desert or frontier saloon. Oddly, only one script was actually written with Jack Kelly in mind during the first three years of the series, since the writers were instructed to picture Garner as the lead regardless of which actor would actually wind up playing it, and the scripts with both brothers were written with the Mavericks designated as "Maverick 1" and "Maverick 2" (Garner chose which part he'd play in these two-brother episodes since he had seniority, which was a tremendous advantage). Recurring supporting roles included Efrem Zimbalist as Dandy Jim Buckley, Richard Long as Gentleman Jack Darby, Arlene Howell as Cindy Lou Brown, and Leo Gordon as Big Mike McComb. The hugely popular and charismatic Garner left over a contract dispute with the studio after the series' third year and was replaced by Roger Moore as Bart's cousin Beau Maverick (1960-1961). Garner appeared in 52 episodes, Kelly in 75, and Moore in just 15. Moore quit due to declining script quality, explaining that if he'd had the level of superb writing that Garner had enjoyed during the first two years of the show's run, he would have stayed (some of Moore's shows are quite good, however, particularly an episode written and directed by Robert Altman). Garner lookalike Robert Colbert was clothed in an outfit identical to Garner's and cast as still another brother, Brent Maverick, for two episodes in 1961, famously pleading with the studio at the time over the comparisons to Garner that would inevitably ensue, "Put me in a dress and call me Brenda but don't do this to me!" The memorable theme song was penned by prolific composer David Buttolph. After leaving the series, James Garner continued with an extraordinary movie career spanning half a century, appearing in at least two real classics, The Great Escape (1963) and Paddy Chayefsky's magnificently written anti-war D-Day comedy, The Americanization of Emily (1964). Garner also did several other TV series over the decades, including Roy Huggins' The Rockford Files from 1974 to 1980, an extremely well-written modern-day update of the Maverick character as a detective rather than a gambler, with many of the plots recycled from the first series. Roger Moore inherited the role of James "007" Bond after both Sean Connery and George Lazenby had quit the part, and played Bond in movies from 1973 to 1985. Jack Kelly worked mainly as a supporting player in films and television series for several more years before going into real estate and local politics in California, occasionally returning to the screen in various Maverick revivals prior to his death in 1992 (he'd played Bart Maverick only the year before in a Kenny Rogers vehicle called The Gambler Returns: Luck of the Draw). Robert Colbert starred in the 1966-67 science fiction TV series Time Tunnel and appeared on The Young and the Restless from 1973 to 1983. Writer/producer Roy Huggins focused his formidable creativity on many other TV series (The Fugitive, Baretta, 77 Sunset Strip, Run For Your Life, City of Angels, The Virginian, etc.) and died in 2002. Two different books on the Maverick TV series were each published in 1994, one by Burl Barer and the other by Ed Robertson, and serve as the main sources for the background information in this article. [Please note that the observation that Diane Brewster had earlier played "Samantha Crawford" in an installment of the Cheyenne TV series is directly based on a viewing of the episode at the Museum of Television & Radio; Brewster's character introduces herself to Cheyenne Bodie (Clint Walker) with her full name, a detail that Roy Huggins had apparently forgotten when talking to the authors of the Maverick books almost forty years later, even though it's his own mother's maiden name.]

Spin offs

The series had a number of spin-offs:

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