Bret Maverick
Genre: Western, Comedy
Started: 1st December 1981
Ended: 4th May 1982
Episodes: 18
Country: United States of America
Starring: James Garner, Richard Hamilton, Stuart Margolin, Darleen Carr, Ramon Bieri, Ed Bruce
Bret Maverick is an American Western series starring 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. The series was produced by Garner's company Cherokee Productions (mistakenly dubbed "Comanche Productions" on the end credits) in association with Warner Bros. Television.
Although the ratings were respectable, the show was unexpectedly canceled by NBC at the end of the first season. Jack Kelly, who had alternated the lead with Garner and later Roger Moore in the original 1957-1962 series, 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; Bart was going to look after the saloon in Arizona while Bret ranged across the West.
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 off publicity surrounding the Mel
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