MAVERICK: The Complete Series Box Set

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, Jack Kelly, Roger Moore, and Robert Colbert as the poker-playing traveling Mavericks (Bret, Bart, Beau, & Brent). Moore and Colbert were later additions, though there were never more than two current Mavericks in the series at any given time, and sometimes only one.

Maverick told the story of Bret Maverick, a card shark who lived during the Old West era. The show was originally a straightforward tale of his adventures, but it evolved when the writers began adding comedy into the scripts. Bret quickly became the television western's first mercenary, a character who would help the forces of justice only if he stood to profit from doing so. When he did have to use a gun, he wasn't much of a marksman. In fact, he was much more likely to slip out the backdoor when trouble began instead of sticking around for the fight. The writers also added a straight man for Bret in the form of his brother, Bart. He was more conservative than the devilish Bret, but just as unlikely to join any fight that he could avoid.

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 Williams" (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).