Talk:List of Maverick episodes

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Massive edits

When I encountered it, this list was unfocused. It included a lot of information that was well outside the scope of an article about Maverick episodes. Quite against WP:List, its lead failed to qualify what scope the list would have, and merely indicated that the page would be "an adjunct" to the Maverick page. Consequently, it became a kind of "dumping ground" for any information the nearly-singular editor wished to place here.

For this reason, I'm redacting much of the article to fit commonly accepted "norms" for an episode list across the television WikiProject. To the extent that it is practicable, I shall paste deleted material here, for archival purposes only. The information saved here really has no business on this list page. However, future editors may find a place for the information elsewhere. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 02:25, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Archived info

Other Maverick Sightings

REASON DELETED: Completely beside the point. Has only the most tangential relationship to a list of the 1967 series' episodes.

• Maverick supporting character Samantha Crawford (played by Diane Brewster) first appeared in a 1956 episode of Cheyenne entitled "The Dark Rider". Her name was writer/producer Roy Huggins' mother's maiden name.

• Alongside many other western stars, James Garner made a quick gag appearance as Bret Maverick in the 1959 Bob Hope western/comedy Alias Jesse James. Due to legal complications and rights-clearance issues, many current prints of this film do not contain Garner's appearance, but it was in the original theatrical cut.

• James Garner and Jack Kelly appeared as Bret and Bart in the 1978 TV movie The New Maverick, which centered around the adventures of cousin Ben Maverick, played by Charles Frank. Garner has at least as much screen time as Frank, but Kelly only appears for a few memorable minutes near the end, and in some clips from the 1957 series near the beginning.

• Garner appeared briefly as Bret at the very beginning of the first episode of Young Maverick, a short-lived 1979 TV series continuing the adventures of Ben Maverick (again played by Frank). Despite the title, 32-year-old Frank was three years older than Garner had been at the beginning of the original series.

• Garner starred in a sequel TV series from 1981-1982 called Bret Maverick, concerning the further adventures of Bret. Although Bret Maverick was twenty years older and now quite famous throughout the west, this show is actually set further back in time than the original series; Garner and his staff figured no one would notice, and apparently nobody did. Garner subsequently admitted in his interview for the Archive of American Television that the writing wasn't up to the level of the original series, which was what sunk the show (although ratings were fairly good at the time of cancellation). Huggins, conspicuously uninvolved in this series, said that he thought the problem was that Maverick, always a traveler in the original show, was stuck in a single town for this one. Jack Kelly turned up as Bart Maverick in the series' final episode. In the never-filmed second season, for which a number of scripts had been actually written and presented to Kelly prior to the cancellation, Bret was going to resume traveling incessantly while Bart managed the bar back in Arizona.

• The 2-hour opening episode of Bret Maverick was subsequently trimmed and frequently rerun on local television stations as a TV-movie under the title Bret Maverick: The Lazy Ace.

• Along with many other stars of 50s and 60s TV westerns, Jack Kelly made a brief cameo appearance as Bart Maverick in the 1991 TV movie The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw. Kelly died the following year.

• Garner had a significant supporting role in the 1994 film version of Maverick, which features Mel Gibson as Bret Maverick and Jodie Foster as a character modeled after Samantha Crawford.

• "Maverick" brand playing cards, with the name written on the boxes in the same font as in the opening credits of the television series, have been available in America for five decades, and the Dallas Mavericks sports team was named after Garner, one of the original owners, according to Garner's Archive of American Television interview.

• On April 21 2006, a ten-foot bronze statue of James Garner as Bret Maverick was unveiled in Garner's original hometown of Norman, Oklahoma. Garner was present at the ceremony.

Writers

REASON DELETED: This information should be included in the episode list itself. The template allows for a "Writer" field. Bunching it all together in a single paragraph at the end of the list defeats the purpose of creating a list.

Writers for Maverick included Roy Huggins ("Shady Deal at Sunny Acres"), Russell S. Hughes ("According to Hoyle"), Gerald Drayson Adams ("Stampede"), Montgomery Pittman ("The Saga of Waco Williams"), Douglas Heyes ("The Quick and the Dead"), Marion Hargrove ("The Jail at Junction Flats"), Howard Browne ("Duel at Sundown"), Leo Townsend ("The Misfortune Teller"), Gene Levitt ("The Comstock Conspiracy"), Leo Gordon (who also acted on the series), and George Waggner, among many others.

Seasonal notes

While there may be a need for general notes about each season, these may have to be trimmed radically. Most television episode lists don't, in fact, include more than a sentence or two of explanation. In some cases, the explanation here goes on for several paragraphs. Much of the information given is interesting, but unsubstantiated by any reference. Maverick is a different sort of television show, what with all its cast changes, so some explanation is required. But nothing like this huge, rambling, uncited block of text at season 4:

Garner leaves the show in a contract dispute; his one episode this season, also featuring Kelly, is actually a holdover filmed in season 3. Bret and Bart had technically appeared together in sixteen episodes together over the course of the series by the time Garner departs, but only shared a large amount of screen time in eleven of them (Hostage!, The Wrecker, Trail West to Fury, Seed of Deception, Shady Deal at Sunny Acres, Game of Chance, Two Beggars on Horseback, Pappy, Maverick Springs, Maverick and Juliet, and The Maverick Line). All but one of the other two-brother episodes are actually Garner's with cameo appearances by Kelly, with the exception being The Jeweled Gun, in which their roles were switched at the last minute due to a schedule conflict and Garner wound up making his single cameo appearance in a Kelly episode. In the wake of Garner's departure from the series, Jack Kelly stays on as Bart Maverick, and is joined as alternate lead by Roger Moore as Cousin Beau Maverick. Kelly and Moore are also featured in occasional two-cousin episodes.

Unhappy with the scripts, Moore leaves the show before season's end, remarking that if his stories had been as good as Garner's in the first two seasons, he would have stayed. He had filmed fourteen episodes as Beau. Around the same time, the producers cast Garner lookalike Robert Colbert as brother Brent Maverick; he gets one team-up episode with Bart and one solo adventure before season 4 comes to a close and Brent disappears. Brent was dressed identically to Bret, and the studio had originally intended for Bart, Beau, and Brent to all be on the series simultaneously, but Roger Moore had quit by the time Colbert's episodes aired. Publicity photos survive picturing the three of them together, however.

Really this entire thing can be reduced to:

Jack Kelly stays on as Bart Maverick, and is joined as alternate lead by Roger Moore, who now plays Cousin Beau Maverick. Kelly and Moore are also featured in occasional two-cousin episodes. With the exception of a single episode held over from the third season, Garner is no longer a part of the show. Before the end of the season, Moore also leaves, to be briefly replaced by Robert Colbert as brother Brent Maverick late in the season.

I agree with leaving that sort of extraneous material out. I think that fields for guest stars, and roles, for each episode, writer(s), and director should be included. The entry for each episode should be in a more-or-less standard form, instead of the single free-form paragraph that I see today. I will be making changes accordingly. Wastrel Way (talk) 02:29, 27 September 2020 (UTC) Eric

Immediately I removed: "Huggins wrote this episode as the pilot but Warner Brothers insisted on first airing an episode based on a property they previously owned. Huggins noted in his Archive of American Television interview that this was done to deny him the residuals for creating the series, a typical gambit for the studio at that time. Huggins wasn't given credit as series creator by the studio until the movie version with Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, and Garner almost forty years later." from Episode 2. Addendum: There appear to be things of this nature in the description of nearly every episode and also unsourced commentary about the episode itself. From now on it will simply be removed; look at the edit history for changes. Short synopsis, guest stars, writers, director and perhaps some notes are all that is needed. Wastrel Way (talk) 02:48, 27 September 2020 (UTC) Eric

I have received negative feedback about the changes I made, and although the information I added has been kept, the extraneous material has been restored. As a result, the entries for the first two are back to a jumble of stuff. I ain't got time for that. You're fired and I quit. Wastrel Way (talk) 13:02, 8 October 2020 (UTC) Eric

The information I added to the entries for the first two episodes were: a short synopsis without spoilers, a list of credited guest stars, writer and producer, and relevant notes. I put them in a standard format to make it easy to read. I came here hoping to learn the name of the Elvis impersonator who appears early in "Hostage", but that is not here. It seems that the self-appointed person in charge of this page has also edited out the guest stars in episodes one and two. This should probably be considered vandalism.Wastrel Way (talk) 22:57, 5 November 2020 (UTC) Eric

Why not really shorten it and simply delete the whole thing, substituting a link to the Internet Movie Database or one of the several other online lists containing a comfortably minimal amount of information? Or cut and paste only the episode titles themselves from somewhere, thereby eliminating any possibility of extraneous information? Or perhaps most sensibly, simply take Wikipedia itself down from the internet altogether to be absolutely positive that nothing intrusively extraneous remains to distract the unsuspecting reader? MightyArchangel (talk) 17:47, 28 August 2010 (UTC)

Source?

This list is quite a bit different from the one on epguides.com. Any notion of the source or is this just somebody going through their VHS collection?--Isaac R (talk) 18:57, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

• Sources are available at a number of scattered sites besides the excellent one you mentioned but a couple of superb ones are the Internet Movie Database's individual episode breakdown and TV Guide's online version, both of which are surprisingly detailed (the TV Guide one appears to be a comprehensive compilation of original casts and plot summaries from the magazine itself), not to mention the episodes themselves, many of which are available for viewing at the Paley Center for Media in New York City and Los Angeles. Skymasterson (talk) 20:19, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
• I just added in a few of the better external links. Storyliner (talk) 06:32, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Jack Kelly website

There's an enormous website devoted to Jack Kelly, who played Bart Maverick, called "The Tall Dark Stranger There" (it's not mine but if you're interested in the series, you should look at it). The address is http://jackkellytribute.blogspot.com/2012/02/breaking-news-maverick-dvd-cover-art.html Nodios (talk) 20:35, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Apparently the surreptitious creator of this website, who is now believed to have been Nell Lynn Younge, died at some point at least a year ago. Her voluminous website featured 636 separate pages spanning from 2009 until her death in 2021, with pictures and comments. She had collected ("kellected") an enormous trove of Jack Kelly memorabilia across the decades, much of which appears on the site. After her death, her site dropped out of view when googled so the only way to access it is with direct page links like the one in the previous entry, which continues to work as of this writing; once you click on that one, you can navigate your way through the entire site, and I guarantee you'll learn a lot about Jack Kelly that you didn't previously know, no matter who you are. Take a moment and have a look at it. On the whole, it's one of the most amazing fansites I've ever encountered on the internet. Racing Forward (talk) 11:39, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

I've often wondered what Jack Kelly's daughter thought of that gigantic site. I assume that she must've known about it. If she happens to see this post, I would love to hear her thoughts about it. Racing Forward (talk) 11:44, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

Wholesale Synopsis Rewrites

I just noticed that someone's recently been going through the site gradually rewriting all the synopses. I believe that too much of the plots are being given away; I think the original versions were crafted so as to make the episodes recognizable to anyone looking for a specific one but to offer no spoilers whatsoever that will interfere with the pleasure gleaned from watching an episode for the first time. We should be mindful of this as we enjoy writing about this fine series. Jump Forward Immediately (talk) 13:58, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Were the Garner episodes included in the billing switch giving Jack Kelly top billing above James Garner in the 5th season?

This might seem idiotic to many people but I find it rather intriguing myself although I'm not sure why that is. For the 5th season, Warner Bros. fired Robert Colbert as Brent Maverick (by not calling him back) and only filmed a half season of new episodes with Jack Kelly, alternating them with reruns of Garner episodes from earlier seasons. The series reversed the billing to "Starring Jack Kelly as Bart Maverick and James Garner as Bret Maverick" for the 5th season, with a peppier version of the theme song at the end, replete with the riverboat bell ringing.

My question is this: did the studio change the beginning and end for the Garner reruns as well as Kelly's new episodes, or did it run the older episodes with the billing as originally presented? For the leftover held-back Bret/Bart episode in the 4th season, they left the beginning as it had been originally filmed during the 3rd season, with no mention of Roger Moore, but at that point the blood from the Garner/Warner lawsuit, freeing Garner from his contract, was still fresh.

I believe that they changed the openings for the Garner reruns to conform with the opening titles for the new episodes, since I vaguely remember seeing an early Garner episode with Kelly billed above Garner in the opening titles at the Paley Center for Media years ago but I'm not 100% positive about that. Does anyone out there happen to somehow know? Davy Crockett Swings Ol' Betsy (talk) 00:36, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Olive Sturgess

Somebody needs to write a page for actress Olive Sturgess, whose list of television credits are practically as expansive as almost anyone's. I looked at it a moment ago on IMDb and I was amazed. I have a pretty good idea who's going to wind up doing it, unfortunately.... The Final Edict (talk) 20:25, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

Apparently someone listened because the page now exists. Racing Forward (talk) 11:40, 5 August 2022 (UTC)