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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 and featured James Garner and Roger Moore.

Roy Huggins Creates the First TV Anti-Hero

James Garner as Bret Maverick

Maverick presented James Garner as Bret Maverick (1957-1960), an adventurous gambler roaming the Old West, Jack Kelly as his equally skilled brother Bart Maverick (1957-1962), and Roger Moore as English-accented cousin Beau Maverick (1960-1961). James Garner was the only Maverick in the series during the first seven episodes, and the show captivated the country, immediately launching the 29-year-old actor's career into the stratosphere.

Writing Against Formula

Series creator Roy Huggins blithely inverted the usual screen-cowboy customs running rampant through television and movies at the time by dressing his hero in a fancy black broadcloth gambler's suit, an outfit normally reserved in western films for villains, and allowing him to be realistically (and vocally) reluctant to risk his life, although Maverick always eventually wound up forcing himself to be courageous, almost in spite of himself. Maverick frequently flim-flammed adversaries, but only criminals who actually deserved it. Otherwise he was scrupulously honest almost to a fault, in at least one case insisting on repaying a debt that he only arguably owed to begin with (in "According to Hoyle"). Maverick bucked the trend by not being a particularly fast draw with a pistol, but like all TV cowboy heroes of the era, he was almost superhumanly impossible for anyone to beat in any sort of a fistfight (perhaps the one cowboy cliche that Huggins left intact, reportedly at the insistence of the studio).

A New Experience for Viewers

Bret Maverick has been repeatedly referred to by critics as "arguably the first TV anti-hero," and while this type of character has since become the norm in films, Maverick came as something of a shock to 1957 audiences. The gleamingly lustrous black and white photography and Garner's own unique charisma added immeasurably to the effect.

The Series Divides Into Two Halves

Rotating the Show With Maverick's Brother Bart

Superb young actor James Garner was originally supposed to be the only Maverick but the studio eventually hired Jack Kelly to play Bret Maverick's brother Bart, starting with the eighth episode. The producers realized that it took over a week to shoot a single episode, so Kelly was recruited to rotate with Garner as the series lead using two separate crews (while occasionally appearing together). Huggins wisely had Bart tied up and beaten by an evil police officer during his first episode to engender audience sympathy. Garner introduced each of Kelly's solo episodes for a while until the public could get used to the idea that there were now two Mavericks to contend with.

Stuart Whitman as Bart Maverick?

Other actors also considered for the role of Bart Maverick before Kelly was chosen included Rod Taylor and Stuart Whitman (who played Marshal Jim Crown in the western TV series Cimarron Strip a decade later and strongly resembled Garner in 1957).

Red Apples and Green Apples

The chairman of Kaiser Aluminum, the series' main sponsor at the time, became so perturbed when Kelly was brought in to share the show with Garner that ABC had to cut a new deal that cost the network a small fortune ("I paid for red apples and I get green apples!").

Famous Episodes

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 as a fist-fighting villain), 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).

Jack Kelly's favorite episode was "Two Beggars On Horseback," which depicted a frenzied race between Bret and Bart to cash a check, and was the only time in the series that Kelly also wore a black hat (literally, not figuratively).

Many episodes are humorous while others are deadly serious, and in addition to purely original scripts, producer Roy 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.

The Garner & Kelly Team

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. Kelly lacked Garner's deftly light touch with comedic facial expressions, which has given rise to the myth that Bart was meant to be the more "serious" brother, but since only one script was actually written for Kelly, the difference was mainly in the acting rather than the writing (even though Garner probably did actually wind up with slightly more of the comedy scripts). The scripts with both brothers were written with the Mavericks designated as "Maverick 1" and "Maverick 2," and Garner chose which part he'd play in these two-brother episodes since he had seniority, which was a tremendous advantage.

Garner and Kelly immediately proved to be a stunningly effective team and the episodes featuring them both were audience favorites, with critics frequently citing the electric chemistry between the jaunty Maverick brothers as extraordinary to behold. Bret and Bart often found themselves competing with each other for women or money, or working together in some elaborate scheme to snooker someone who'd just robbed one of them.

Which Maverick brother happened to be the oldest was purposely left ambiguous, with both Bret and Bart emphatically claiming to be the youngest whenever the topic came up in conversation with a woman, but Jack Kelly was a year older than James Garner in life.

Kelly's episodes consistently drew slightly higher ratings than Garner's during the first two seasons (the difference always slight enough to be within the margin of error), but after writer/producer Roy Huggins left the show and there was a gradual decline, Garner's shows scored higher than Kelly's.

Supporting Players

Recurring Roles

Recurring supporting roles included Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. as Dandy Jim Buckley (1957-1958), Diane Brewster as Samantha Crawford (1957-1958), Richard Long as Gentleman Jack Darby (1958-1959), Arlene Howell as Cindy Lou Brown (1958-1959), Leo Gordon as Big Mike McComb (1957-1959), both Gerald Mohr and Peter Breck as Doc Holliday, both John Dehner and Andrew Duggan as Big Ed Murphy, and Kathleen Crowley in multiple appearances as several different romantic interests for Bret and Bart (Melanie Blake, Modesty Blaine, etc.). Mona Freeman also portrayed Modesty Blaine twice, but played the character as borderline homicidal and almost psychotic, with a disturbingly wild look in her eyes, which was quite different from Crowley's interpretation.

Character Actors

Brilliant character actors from the era enhanced every episode, some of them appearing seven or eight times over the course of the series in various roles. A very young Joel Grey played Billy the Kid in an unusual episode that featured a bravura pistol-twirling exhibition by Garner, and a chubby, acne-scarred Robert Redford joined Kelly on a desperate cattle drive.

Theme Song Writers

The memorable theme song was penned by prolific composers David Buttolph (music) and Paul Francis Webster (lyrics).

Cast Changes

Roger Moore as Beau Maverick

The hugely popular and charismatic James 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. Garner appeared in 52 episodes, Jack Kelly in 75, and Roger Moore in just 15. Moore quit due to declining script quality (how he got out of his contract without going to court the way Garner had would probably make a story in itself); Moore insisted 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, and critics noted that Moore and Kelly worked well together).

Robert Colbert as Brent Maverick

Bart and Beau were an interesting combination to watch, but in an effort to slow the ratings slide, Garner lookalike Robert Colbert was clothed in an outfit identical to Garner's and cast as still another brother, Brent Maverick, famously pleading with the studio 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 studio had intended for Kelly, Moore, and Colbert to be on the series at the same time, and a publicity photo exists of Bart, Beau, and Brent standing together on a street with their pistols pointed, as well as a color shot of Bart and Beau admiring the thousand dollar bill pinned to the inside of Brent's jacket (a recurring Maverick plot device), but Roger Moore had already left the show when the first of Colbert's two episodes aired in 1961.

Jack Kelly as Bart Maverick

For the final season in 1962, the studio dropped Colbert and alternated new Kelly episodes with Garner reruns before cancelling the series, and viewers could readily discern the script quality decline in the newer shows. The studio reversed the actors' billing at the beginning of the show for that last season and billed Kelly over Garner (who'd been long absent from the lot by then), with announcer Ed Reimers' stentorian voice intoning, "Starring Jack Kelly and James Garner."

After Maverick

James Garner

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

Roger Moore echoed his Maverick experience by inheriting another series from an actor who'd been phenomenally successful with it by taking over 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

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

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.

Diane Brewster

Among many other TV roles, Diane Brewster subsequently portrayed the schoolteacher Miss Canfield on the 1957 series Leave It to Beaver and Helen Kimble in brief appearances on the original television version of The Fugitive, dying in 1991.

Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.

Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. later played the lead in TV's 77 Sunset Strip and The FBI, and appeared as another recurring character on his daughter Stephanie Zimbalist's TV series, Remington Steele, which featured another future movie James Bond, Pierce Brosnan.

Roy Huggins

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, The Rockford Files, etc.) and died in 2002.

Sources

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 based on a viewing of the episode ("Dark Rider") at the Museum of Television & Radio; Brewster's character introduces herself to Cheyenne Bodie (Clint Walker) with her full name, a detail that writer/producer Roy Huggins had understandably forgotten when talking to the authors of the Maverick books almost four decades later, even though it's his own mother's maiden name.]

Spin-Offs

The series had a number of spin-offs:

The New Maverick
  • The New Maverick (1978), a TV-movie doubling as a pilot for an upcoming series, with 50-year-old James Garner and Jack Kelly reprising their roles as the Maverick brothers and Charles Frank playing their slippery young cousin Ben Maverick. Garner actually shot this TV-movie while on hiatus from The Rockford Files, which continued for two more years after The New Maverick was filmed. Kelly only appeared in a few scenes near the end of the film, which had also been the case in several episodes of the earlier series.
Beau's Son Takes A Turn
  • Young Maverick (1979), a short-lived revival starring Charles Frank as Ben Maverick, son of Beau. Bret Maverick (James Garner) appeared for a minute or two at the very beginning of the first episode, driving a buckboard he'd won in a poker game. It was apparent that Bret didn't much care for his young cousin Ben (an inauspicious but amusing way to launch the new series), and when the two parted at the nearest crossroads, some critics later noted that the audience couldn't help but think that the camera was following the wrong Maverick. This series ended so quickly that several episodes that had already been filmed never made it to broadcast.
Bret Maverick At 53
  • Bret Maverick (1981-82), another revival starring 53-year-old James Garner as an older-but-no-wiser Bret Maverick. Garner physically looked so similar to the way that he had two decades earlier that newspapers and magazines ran head shots from the two series side by side in amazement. Jack Kelly appeared as Bret's brother Bart in only one episode but was slated to return as a series regular for the following season before the network shocked everyone by cancelling the show despite respectable ratings. The series involved Bret Maverick settling down in a small town in Arizona after winning a saloon in a poker game. Critics were practically unanimous that the scripts more closely resembled the inferior ones from the latter part of the original Maverick series than the classic ones from the first years of the show. The last scene of Bret Maverick depicted Bret and Bart embracing during an unexpected encounter, with the theme from the original series playing in the background, the perfect ending.
Luck of the Draw
Mel Gibson as Bret Maverick?
  • Maverick (1994), a movie starring Mel Gibson as Bret Maverick and Jodie Foster as the requisite gambling "southern" belle, featured Garner in a significant supporting role.
  • (In addition, the DC Comics character, Bat Lash, emulates the Mavericks in many respects.)
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