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Bret Maverick
Bret Maverick is a 1981 television series featuring
James Garner in the role that made him famous in the 1957 series
Maverick: a professional poker player traveling alone year after year
through the Old West from riverboat to saloon. Although the ratings
were respectable, the show was unexpectedly canceled by NBC at the end
of the first season. Jack Kelly had been slated to return as Bret's
brother Bart Maverick in the second season, and briefly appeared at the
very end of the only season. A number of scripts for the following
season had been written and presented to Kelly, according to subsequent
interviews. NBC took the unusual step of rerunning the episodes two
additional times - in the summer of 1988 to help provide 'new'
programming during a writers strike, and in the summer of 1994 to play
of off publicity surrounding the Mel Gibson movie remake of the
original Maverick series.
The 1978 TV-movie The New Maverick
could be said to be the pilot for both this series and the 1979 failure
Young Maverick, a short-lived series which had featured Charles Frank
as preppie former Harvard student Ben Maverick, the son of Roger
Moore's character Beau Maverick (although Moore only appeared in the
original series).
The production of this series was linked to Garner's quitting midway
through the sixth season of
The
Rockford Files in 1979/1980. Because he couldn't finish The
Rockford Files, although he was contractually obligated, he made a deal
that he would reprise his Maverick role in a new series.[citation
needed]
Other recurring cast members of this series, set in a small Arizona
town, include country singer Ed Bruce as a sheriff, Stuart Margolin as
a crooked Native American, Richard Hamilton as the aging but feisty
foreman of Maverick's ranch, and Darleen Carr as a fetching editor of
the local newspaper. The 2-hour first episode was eventually trimmed
and repackaged as a TV movie for rerunning on local stations under the
title Bret Maverick: The Lazy Ace. Additionally the series' only
two-part episode was similarly repackaged as Bret Maverick: Faith, Hope
and Clarity.
Writer/producer Roy Huggins, original creator of the titular character
but otherwise unconnected with this series despite Garner's request
that he come aboard mid-season, speculated that one reason the new show
didn't quite work was that Maverick, traditionally a drifter, had
settled down in one place; this was going to be rectified the following
season, in which Bret would travel while Bart ran the saloon in
Arizona.
As a tribute to the character featured on this television series, on
April 21, 2006, a ten-foot bronze statue of James Garner as Bret
Maverick was unveiled in Garner's hometown of Norman, Oklahoma, with
Garner present at the ceremony.
Cast
* James Garner ... Bret Maverick
* Ed Bruce ... Tom Guthrie
* Ramon Bieri ... Elijah Crow
* John Shearin ... Mitchell Dowd
* David Knell ... Rodney Catlow
* Richard Hamilton ... Cy Whittaker
* Stuart Margolin ... Philo Sandeen
* Darleen Carr ... Mary Lou Springer