Maverick: Season 04 (1960)

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The popular tongue-in-cheek western series Maverick entered its fourth season one "Maverick" shy. James Garner, who'd risen to stardom in the role of self-protective frontier gambler Bret Maverick, had long been complaining about the relative pittance he was being paid for his efforts by home studio Warner Bros.. The proverbial back-breaking straw came in early 1960,when the studio suspended Garner without pay, claiming that a Hollywood writers' strike had prevented Warners from turning out any new Maverick scripts--though curiously, Garner's costar Jack Kelly remained on the payroll. Bound by his contract to remain on the series despite this cavalier treatment, Garner sued Warners for breach of contract, finally winning his case when it was proven that the studio had actually built up a healthy reserve of scripts during the strike (some of which were retreads of earlier scripts, pseudonymously created to one "W. Hermanos"!) The upshot of all this backstage intrigue was that Maverick began its fourth season with Jack Kelly as the sole star, playing his familiar role of Bart Maverick. During Garner's absence, the studio attempted to create a new star in the person of future "James Bond" Roger Moore, who is introduced in the season opener "A Bundle from Britain". Moore plays Bret and Bart's English cousin Beau Maverick, who is the "White Sheep" of the family because he was actually decorated for heroics in the Civil War! While Moore played his part admirably, he was no James Garner, and was quietly written out of the show in mid-season. And when it was clear that Garner was never coming back, Warners' brought in a hitherto unknown third Maverick brother, Brent Maverick, played by Robert Colbert. Introduced in the episode "The Forbidden City", Brent survived only three more episodes before he, too, was axed. All of this cast-shuffling had a deleterious effect on the series' ratings, which for the first time in two years dropped completely out of the Top Thirty. Even so, Maverick's fourth season still yielded quite a few golden moments, notably the episode "Hadley's Hunters", which contrives to include cameo appearances by virtually the entire Warners TV-western lineup: Clint Walker (Cheyenne), Will Hutchins (Sugarfoot), Ty Hardin (Bronco), and John Russell and Peter Brown (Lawman)--not to mention Edd Byrnes, then playing the comb-wielding "Kookie" on the studio's non-western series 77 Sunset Strip. Also making guest appearances this season are a pre-Beverly Hillbillies Max Baer Jr. in the aforementioned "A Bundle of Britain"; another Beverly Hillbillies stalwart, Buddy Ebsen, atypically cast as a cold-blooded murderer in "Last Stop: Oblivion"; future Addams Family patriarch John Astin in "The Town That Wasn't There"' and Alan Hale Jr., aka "The Skipper" of Gilligan's Island fame, in "Arizona Black Maria". Season Four of Maverick concludes with the series' only two-part episode, "The Devil's Necklace." ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi