Maverick (TV series)

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, Roger Moore, and Jack Kelly as poker-playing traveling gamblers.

Roy Huggins Creates An 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 when Maverick became a national sensation during a time of only three major television networks and just three or four TV channels available in most cities, besting both The Ed Sullivan Show and The Steve Allen Show in audience size.

Series creator Roy Huggins deliberately 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, usually in spite of himself.

Bret 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 Whole 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 unique charisma added immeasurably to the effect. Critics noted that few actors anywhere could best Garner when it came to subtly comedic facial expressions.

The Series Divides Into Two Halves

=Bret and Bart Maverick

=Superb young actor James Garner was originally supposed to be the only Maverick but the studio eventually hired Jack Kelly (brother of movie actress Nancy 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.

Bart Maverick was originally intended to be more or less a clone of his brother Bret, dressing similarly and speaking identical dialogue; the only discernible difference was in the ways the two actors played their parts. No separate personalities were ever concocted for subsequent Mavericks by the writing staffs as the cast changed over the years. The names changed but the poker skills and every other attribute remained exactly the same except for the different actors playing Maverick.

Garner as Bret usually wore a black cowboy hat, often changing its placement on his head from one scene to the next, while Kelly as Bart almost always wore a light grey one, and both wore black or grey suit jackets when gambling in saloons (usually black jackets, but occasionally grey; Kelly wore grey suits in his first few episodes but soon switched to black for the rest of the series, always wearing a light grey hat except for one occasion. Garner at 6'3" was two inches taller than Kelly, leading a character in one episode ("Seed of Deception") to refer to them as "the big one" and "the little one." Garner always generated more attention from the public and the media during the run of the series than Kelly, leading Kelly in later years to cheerfully remark, "Garner was Maverick. I was his brother."

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 closely 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" (in which Bret spends most of the acclaimed episode apparently relaxing in a rocking chair, calmly whittling and offhandedly assuring the inquisitive and derisively amused townspeople that he's "working on it" while Bart runs a complex sting operation to swindle a crooked banker who'd blithely pocketed Bret's deposit of $15,000), "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), "The Saga of Waco Wiliams" (which also drew the largest viewership of the series), "Gun-Shy" (a spoof of Gunsmoke), and "Duel At Sundown" (with Clint Eastwood as a fist-fighting villain).

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

"Pappy" stands out as a unique episode, with James Garner playing both Bret and Bret's father Beau, an important but previously unseen character always referred to throughout the run of the series as "Pappy." Bret and Bart were both constantly saying, "As my Pappy used to say" then reeling off some intriguing aphorism like "Work is fine for killing time but it's a shaky way to make a living." In this particular episode, Pappy was brought to life for the only time in the series by Garner, and Bret also winds up disguising himself as his own grey-haired, moustachioed father as part of the plotline. The split screen sequences with two Garners in the same shot were singled out by critics as especially interesting. Jack Kelly also plays a dual role, briefly portraying old Beau's brother Bentley, or "Uncle Bent," as Bret calls him.

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 traveling, 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; sophisticated con artist Buckley was a version of Maverick without the ethics), Diane Brewster as Samantha Crawford (1957-1958), Richard Long as Gentleman Jack Darby (1958-1959; Darby filled in for Buckley's character when Zimbalist moved to his own TV detective series), Arlene Howell as Cindy Lou Brown (1958-1959), Leo Gordon as two-fisted Irish ally 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 flamboyantly seductive 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. Stacy Keach, Sr., lookalike father of Stacy Keach, plays a sheriff in "Ghost Rider," and the resemblance to his son is so strong that it confuses modern viewers (how can the actor who played Mike Hammer in the 1980s be in a 1957 episode of Maverick looking exactly the same age? And the closing credits don't help matters any). Lee Van Cleef, John Carradine, Tol Avery, Buddy Ebsen, Chubby Johnson, Hans Conried, and dozens of other topnotch character actors appeared at least once if not several times during the run of the series, and the almost countless attractive ladies included Erin O'Brien, Ruta Lee, Marie Windsor, Joi Lansing, Roxane Berard, Louise Fletcher, Connie Stevens, and Adele Mara.

=Theme Song Writers

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

"Who is the tall dark stranger there?/ Maverick is his name./ Riding the trail to who-knows-where/ Luck is his companion/ Gamblin' is his game./

Smooth as the handle on a gun./ Maverick is his name./ Wild as the wind in Oregon/ Blowin' up a canyon/ Easier to tame./

Riverboat ring your bell./ Fare-thee-well Annabelle./ Luck is the lady that he loves the best./ Natchez to New Orleans./ Livin' on jacks and queens./ Maverick is the legend of the west."

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 cousin Beau Maverick, nephew of the original Beau "Pappy" Maverick. Interestingly, Moore had earlier played a completely different role in a Maverick installment called "The Rivals," a classic drawing room comedy episode with Garner in which Moore's character switched identities with Bret as part of the plotline; the physical resemblance between the two young actors remains surprising.

Roger Moore as Beau Maverick generally wore a grey suit (that had actually previously been worn by Garner) with a light grey cowboy hat, and his self-described "slight English accent" (actually quite heavy) was explained by his having spent the last few years in England. Moore was exactly the same age as Jack Kelly and brought a flair for light comedy and a physical similarity to Garner that fit Maverick perfectly. Critics mentioned that no one had any problem believing that Moore was a Maverick despite the British accent. Moore even looked as much like the profile drawing of the card player at the beginning of each show as Garner had, even though it was obviously Garner's likeness.

James 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 in their several two-Maverick episodes).

Weirdly, Roger Moore had actually played some of Garner's Maverick scripts in an earlier TV series called The Alaskans. The Warner Brothers studio was fond of endlessly recycling the same script through each of their television series to save money on writers, literally changing only the names and the locales, and Moore had actually played Garner's role in recycled scripts from Maverick. No wonder studio head Jack Warner had no problem visualizing Roger Moore as Maverick.

=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.

Oddly, in the one comic book based on the series that featured Colbert's photograph on the cover, Colbert's character Brent was called "Bret" even though he was drawn to look like Colbert rather than Garner.

=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." Prior to that final season, Garner had always been billed over Kelly, even in episodes in which Garner barely appeared, and Kelly was subsequently billed over both Roger Moore and Robert Colbert in a typical seniority arrangement.

After Maverick

=Roy Huggins

=Writer/producer Roy Huggins left Maverick at the end of the second season but later 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.

=James Garner

=After leaving the series, James Garner (Bret Maverick) 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 and screen legend Wallace Beery's nephew Noah Beery, Jr. appearing frequently as the detective's genial father. After The Rockford Files, Garner attempted a more direct Maverick revival with the Bret Maverick series, and also appeared in the 1994 movie version with Mel Gibson as Bret Maverick and Jodie Foster as a gambling lass based on Samantha Crawford.

=Jack Kelly

=Jack Kelly (Bart Maverick) 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). Kelly sometimes used the slogan "Let Maverick Solve Your Problems" when running for office.

=Roger Moore

=Roger Moore (Beau Maverick) echoed his Maverick experience by inheriting another series from an actor who'd been phenomenally successful with it by taking over the movie role of Ian Fleming's James "007" Bond after both Sean Connery and George Lazenby had quit the part, and played Bond in theatrical films from 1973 to 1985.

=Robert Colbert

=Robert Colbert (Brent Maverick) 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 (Samantha Crawford) 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. (Dandy Jim Buckley) later played the lead in TV's 77 Sunset Strip and The FBI, and also appeared as a recurring character on his daughter Stephanie Zimbalist's TV series, Remington Steele, which featured another future movie James Bond, Pierce Brosnan.

Zimbalist Jr. also played Don Diego's father, Don Alejandro on the '80 Zorro TV series and is the voice of Batman's Butler, Alfred on BAtman:The Animated Series.

=Richard Long

=Richard Long (Gentleman Jack Darby) went on to play leads in the TV series Bourbon Street Beat (1959) and 77 Sunset Strip the following year (playing Rex Randolph in both shows), The Big Valley (1965), and Nanny and the Professor (1970) before dying of a heart attack in 1974 at the age of 47.

Spin-Offs

The series had an almost astonishing number of spin-offs:

=Bret and Bart 20 Years Later

=
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.

=Ben Maverick Briefly Appears

=
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.

=Bart Maverick's Last Poker Game

=
The Gambler Returns: Luck of the Draw (1991) featured Jack Kelly as Bart Maverick in this odd TV-movie curio that revived many earlier TV cowboys from various series played by the original actors, including Bat Masterson (Gene Barry), Wyatt Earp (Hugh O'Brien), the Rifleman (Chuck Connors) and his son Mark (Johnny Crawford), Caine from Kung Fu (David Carradine), the Westerner (Brian Keith), a thinly disguised Virginian and Trampas (James Drury and Doug McClure), and Cheyenne Bodie (Clint Walker). Kenny Rogers played the lead as part of his TV-movie series based on the hit song ("...know when to fold 'em..."), with the others more or less relegated to brief appearances, including Bart Maverick.
*[Garner made a similar appearance as Bret Maverick in 1959 for a Bob Hope movie called Alias Jesse James that also featured Hugh O'Brien as Wyatt Earp, along with a smattering of other unbilled screen cowboys dressed in their most familiar garb, including Fess Parker (Davy Crockett), Gary Cooper, Roy Rogers and Trigger, Jay Silverheels (Tonto from The Lone Ranger), Gail Davis (Annie Oakley), James Arness (Matt Dillon of Gunsmoke), and Ward Bond (Seth Adams of Wagon Train), not to mention Hope's frequent screen partner Bing Crosby. Garner's appearance in the film is frequently absent from television presentations of the movie due to problems with the rights to the character.]

=Mel Gibson as Bret Maverick

=
Maverick (1994) was a lavish movie version featuring Mel Gibson as Bret Maverick, Jodie Foster as the requisite gambling "southern" belle, and James Garner in a significant supporting role. Intriguingly, there was a "Making of" mini-documetary to publicize the movie that was shown on cable TV around the time of the film's release, featuring interviews, behind-the-scenes looks at filming, and so on, but showed no clips of Garner as Bret Maverick from the original series. The studio finally acknowledged that Roy Huggins created the original series in the credits for this movie.
*(In addition, the DC Comics character, Bat Lash, emulates the Mavericks in many respects.)

=Ten-Foot Statue of Bret Maverick

=
*On April 21, 2006, a ten-foot tall bronze statue of James Garner as Bret Maverick was unveiled in Garner's hometown of Norman, Oklahoma, with Garner present at the ceremony.

Maverick Episode List

For a complete list of every episode in the series with comments and notations of which recurring characters appeared, see the comprehensive Maverick episode list.

Notes on Source Material

=Two 1994 Books on the Series

=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, together with various magazine pieces from TV Guide, Life, and numerous others, along with viewings of the original series episodes.

=The Museum of Television & Radio

=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.

External links

*Museum of Broadcast Communications: Maverick
*Tim's TV Showcase: Maverick
*TV Tome - Maverick
*Making of "Maverick"
*Maverick Broke the Rules for Westerns on TV by Ed Robertson