Maverick

Maverick is an American Western dramatic television series with comedic overtones created by Roy Huggins and originally starring James Garner. The show ran for five seasons from September 22, 1957, to July 8, 1962, on ABC.

Maverick initially starred James Garner as Bret Maverick, an adroitly articulate cardsharp. Eight episodes into the first season, he was joined by Jack Kelly as his brother Bart Maverick, and for the remainder of the first three seasons, Garner and Kelly alternated leads from week to week, sometimes teaming up for the occasional two-brother episode.

Maverick brothers were poker players from Texas who traveled the American Old West by horseback and stagecoach, and on Mississippi riverboats, constantly getting into and out of life-threatening trouble of one sort or another, usually involving money, women, or both. They would typically find themselves weighing a financial windfall against a moral dilemma. Their consciences always trumped their wallets since both Mavericks were intrinsically ethical.

When Garner left the series after the third season due to a legal dispute, after which Garner began a successful movie career, Roger Moore was added to the cast as cousin Beau Maverick. As before, the two starring Mavericks would generally alternate as series leads, with an occasional "team-up" episode.
Partway through the fourth season Robert Colbert replaced Moore and played a third Maverick brother, Brent. No more than two series leads (of the four total for the run of the series) ever appeared together in the same episode, and most episodes featured only one. All two-Maverick episodes included Jack Kelly as Bart Maverick.

For the fifth and final season, the show returned to a "single Maverick" format, as it had originally been in the first eight episodes, with all the remaining new episodes starring Kelly as Bart. The new episodes, however, alternated with reruns from earlier seasons starring Garner as Bret.

Budd Boetticher directed several of the early episodes of the first season until sharply disagreeing with Huggins about Maverick's philosophy, which resulted in Boetticher assigning Bret Maverick's scripted lines to supporting characters and filming the result, thereby attempting to change the whole series by making Maverick into a standard Western hero as found in the earlier Boetticher-directed series of theatrical films starring Randolph Scott. Robert Altman wrote and directed the episode entitled "Bolt from the Blue", starring Roger Moore, in the fourth season, with a couple of scenes later purloined for the subsequent Mel Gibson movie version.

The show was part of the Warner Bros. array of TV Westerns, which included Cheyenne, Colt .45, Lawman, Bronco, The Alaskans, and Sugarfoot.