The premise was simple. The Maverick brothers, Bret and Bart, drifted from town to town looking for poker games and profit. They were quick thinkers, careful with their money and openly wary of heroics. If a situation could be solved with a bluff or a smart exit, that was the preferred route. Violence was an inconvenience, not a calling. That approach alone set the show apart from contemporaries like Gunsmoke, where law and order carried heavier weight.
What really made Maverick stand out, though, was its sense of humor. Scripts often winked at familiar Western setups. In one 1958 column, critic John Crosby described an episode that practically dismantled the standard showdown, complete with exaggerated gunfire and commentary that undercut the drama. The show was comfortable poking fun at the very formulas that had made the TV Western dominant in the first place.
The characters reinforced that tone. Bret and Bart were gamblers and occasional schemers, guided by sayings attributed to “Pappy,” whose advice emphasized nerve and good odds. They were not reformers or crusaders. More often, they were trying to avoid trouble that found them anyway. Even when treasure turned up, it rarely translated into lasting fortune. The brothers usually moved on, intact but not enriched.
- Amazon Prime Video (Video on Demand)
- Jack Kelly, James Garner, Roger Moore (Actors)
- Budd Boetticher (Director) - Roy Huggins (Producer)
By the late 1950s, Westerns were so common that a little self-awareness went a long way. Maverick suggested that audiences could enjoy frontier settings without solemn speeches or perfect marksmanship. The series blended light adventure with satire, opening the door for other shows to experiment within established genres.
Below, you’ll find vintage reviews, promotional images and clips from Maverick’s original run. Together, they show how one ABC series managed to fit into the Western boom while making an effort to reshape it — one poker hand at a time.
Is Maverick a Western? Well, don’t look close (1958)
By John Crosby, Miami Herald (Florida) December 31, 1958
The Maverick brothers, Bret and Bart (played respectively by Jack Kelly and James Garner), have been playing hob with the ratings of Steve Allen and Ed Sullivan and even occasionally Jack Benny, and that leads to a lot of loose talk that the cash customers who buy soap want only Westerns.
Actually, the Mavericks hail from New Orleans, are gamblers by trade, and ply their shady profession all over the globe, including (quite recently) the South Seas.
If Maverick is a Western, it is one with a large wink. Much of the time the authors seem intent, not so much on doing a Western, as on ribbing the pants off Westerns. I recall one script called Gun Shy, which seemed intent on ridiculing the whole genus Western. This is the way Marion Hargrove, the author, starts it:
“This one is a little like the vignette they use on one of those low pressure Saturday Westerns, but the similarity wasn’t noticed until it was too late to do anything about it. We can only hope that nobody watches television on Saturday nights.
“Our own vignette opens on a long shot of a Western street: empty and tense. A wide behind with a large revolver hung on it, crosses the frame so close to the camera that it’s practically polishing the lens. The large gunman who is the Town Marshal, pauses for a shot in the foreground and we note that he is facing another man who stands way the hell down at the far end of the street.”
Lightning draw
“Suddenly the marshal does a lightning draw and fires at the heavy down the street. Then he looks puzzled as if he were missing some blue pages in the script and fires five times more. The guy at the far end of the street is still standing there. He leans toward us and calls out. We recognize the pleasant helpful tone as the voice of our hero, Bret Maverick:
‘Shall I stand a little closer, marshal?’ ”
The whole tone, in short, is quite a lot different from Gunsmoke. (Imagine Matt Dillon missing six shots! The whole social fabric of the West would come unstuck.) This particular episode was a bit more of a spoof on Westerns than most of them. The cast list, for instance, read in part like this:
BRET MAVERICK—A refugee from Warner Bros. submarine pictures.
FREDDIE HAWKINS—A mature cockney gentleman with black eyebrows and store-bought hair. A thorough-going thief, a congenital and gifted liar, a crafty and seasoned schemer of the highest criminal type.
MORT DOOLEY—Town marshal at Ellwood, Kansas. Large grim humorless and a sitting duck at all times.
AMY WARD—Thirtyish and decollete, the typical hard-but-wholesome saloon-keeper.
1ST INDIAN—Who has trouble understanding this Indian-talk jazz.
Search for treasure
This particular caper dealt with a search for buried treasure in which Mort Dooley (shades of Matt Dillon) kept running Maverick out of town. Ran him out about four times. Every time Mort would buckle on his guns Amy would lay her hand on his arm, look up at him soulfully, and say: Be careful, Mort.
The Maverick brothers are incessantly mixed up in shady enterprises, but they never profit from them, far as I can see. In this particular one, Bret finally found the treasure which turned out to be Confederate money.
Not long ago, the Mavericks did a free-hand version of an old Robert Louis Stevenson story called The Wreckers. In this one they got hold of a wrecked ship in the South Seas, only to dump the opium overboard virtuously instead of taking it back to the States and selling it.
Con men
In short, they are con men with a heart of gold—which limits the take pretty drastically. Their upbringing seems to have been done by Pappy, not Mommy, and their talk is constantly interlarded with such pearls of wisdom as: “I promised Pappy I’d never take a drink or a steady job.” Or: “As Pappy always said—Faint heart never filled a flush.” Not, you notice, an inside straight. Pappy had more sense than to encourage that sort of idiocy but he did teach the youngsters to welcome adventure, provided the odds weren’t hopelessly against it.
Just the same a series that pokes fun at such sacred things as Gunsmoke indicates — not that Westerns are on the way up — but just possibly that they are on the way down.
Vintage Maverick TV show promos with Kaiser Aluminum (1958 & 1960)
VIDEO | Maverick opening
James Garner as Bret Maverick in “Maverick”
