The Maverick brothers were both poker players from Texas who traveled the American Old West by horseback and stagecoach, and on Mississippi riverboats, constantly getting into and out of life-threatening trouble of one sort or another, usually involving money, women, or both.

Though the Mavericks were quick to claim they were motivated by money, and made a point of humorously emphasizing their supposed belief in cowardice and avoiding hard work, in many episodes they would find themselves weighing a financial windfall against a moral dilemma.

When Garner left the series after the third season due to a legal dispute, after which he enjoyed a successful film career, Roger Moore was added to the cast as cousin Beau Maverick.

The show was part of the Warner Bros. array of TV Westerns, which included Cheyenne with Clint Walker, Colt .45 with Wayde Preston, Lawman with John Russell, Bronco with Ty Hardin, The Alaskans with Roger Moore, and Sugarfoot with Will Hutchins.

Though James Garner was originally supposed to be the only Maverick, the studio eventually hired Jack Kelly to play brother Bart, starting with the eighth episode.

According to series creator Roy Huggins in an interview with the Archive of American Television, the two brothers were purposely written to be virtual clones, with no apparent differences inherent in the scripts whatsoever.

This included being traveling poker players, loving money, professing to be cowards (despite voluminous evidence to the contrary), spouting enigmatic words of advice their "Pappy" passed down to them, and carrying a $1,000 bill pinned to the inside of a coat for emergency purposes.

Beau's first appearance was in the season four opener, "The Bundle from Britain", in which he returns from an extended stay in England to meet cousin Bart, used to explain Moore's obvious English accent.

Aware of his resemblance to Garner and wary of the comparisons that would inevitably result, Colbert pleaded with Warner Bros. not to cast him, saying "Put me in a dress and call me Brenda, but don't do this to me!

Eventual Oscar-winner Joel Grey played Billy the Kid in "Full House," an unusual third-season episode that featured a bravura pistol-twirling exhibition by Garner as part of the plot.

Glamorously beautiful young actresses included subsequent Oscar-winner Louise Fletcher as well as Mala Powers, Coleen Gray, Paula Raymond, Ruta Lee, Marie Windsor, Abby Dalton, Karen Steele, Dawn Wells, Connie Stevens, Merry Anders, Kaye Elhardt, Sherry Jackson, Pippa Scott, Saundra Edwards, Peggy McCay, Patricia "Pat" Crowley, Roxane Berard and Adele Mara, some of whom appeared several times.

"[4] Writers for Maverick included creator/producer Roy Huggins ("Shady Deal at Sunny Acres" and "Passage to Fort Doom"), Russell S. Hughes ("According to Hoyle", "The Seventh Hand", "The Burning Sky", and Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Wrecker"), Gerald Drayson Adams ("Stampede"), director Montgomery Pittman (wrote the original story for "The Saga of Waco Williams" which became a teleplay by Gene L. Coon), director Douglas Heyes ("The Quick and the Dead", "The Day They Hanged Bret Maverick", "Escape to Tampico", "Two Beggars on Horseback" and "Two Tickets to Ten Strike"), Marion Hargrove ("The Jail at Junction Flats"), Howard Browne ("Duel at Sundown"), Leo Townsend ("The Misfortune Teller"), Gene Levitt ("The Comstock Conspiracy"), William Driskill ("The Sheriff of Duck 'n' Shoot"), Leo Gordon (who also acted on the series although never in an episode that he had written; apparently the studio didn't want to foster a custom of actors writing their own scripts for television series), director Robert Altman ("Bolt from the Blue") and director George Waggner ("You Can't Beat the Percentage"), among many others.

Roy Huggins recalls in his Archive of American Television interview that this Warners-owned property was selected by the studio to replace "Point Blank" as the first episode to cheat him out of creator residuals.

"Shady Deal at Sunny Acres" features Bret Maverick (James Garner) spending most of the episode relaxing in a rocking chair, calmly whittling and offhandedly assuring the inquisitive and derisively amused townspeople that he's "working on it," while his brother Bart Maverick (Jack Kelly) runs a complex sting operation involving all five of the series' occasionally recurring characters (Dandy Jim Buckley, Samantha Crawford, Gentleman Jack Darby, Big Mike McComb and Cindy Lou Brown) to swindle a crooked banker who had stolen Bret's deposit of $15,000.

In his Archive of American Television interview, Roy Huggins contends that the first half of the later theatrical film The Sting with Paul Newman and Robert Redford was an uncredited restaging of "Shady Deal at Sunny Acres."

"Duel at Sundown" stars Clint Eastwood as a gun-slinging villain in an epic showdown with Bret, also featuring Edgar Buchanan and Abby Dalton in large supporting roles.

The episode "Escape to Tampico" incorporated parts of the actual set of "Rick's Café Américain" from Casablanca for "La Cantina Americana," and contains many allusions to the film.

At 19:19 on the DVD release there is even a short clip from the movie where actors are dressed in French Army and Heer uniforms, and Leonid Kinskey is recognizable tending the bar.

The episode's plot hinges on Gerald Mohr as a white-jacketed saloon owner, similar to Humphrey Bogart's Casablanca character, whom Bret is sent to bring back to America because of a murder during a robbery.

"The Saga of Waco Williams" with Wayde Preston and Louise Fletcher (who later won an Oscar for playing the original "Nurse Ratched" in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) drew the highest viewership of the entire series.

Writer/producer Stephen J. Cannell noted in his Archive of American Television interview that, two decades later, he used Waco Williams as the prototype for "Lance White," Tom Selleck's recurring role on Roy Huggins' and James Garner's subsequent series The Rockford Files.

"The Quick and the Dead" stars Gerald Mohr as Doc Holliday and film noir icon Marie Windsor as a saloon owner in a tense drama with Bret Maverick gingerly attempting to manipulate the terrifying gunslinger.

The one exception to this was "Passage to Fort Doom," a meditation on courage written by Huggins expressly for Jack Kelly, directed by Paul Henreid and featuring Arlene Howell, John Alderson and Diane McBain.

Roger Moore appears in "The Rivals" as a wealthy playboy who switches identities with Bret to facilitate landing a comely lass (Patricia "Pat" Crowley) with whom he's become infatuated.

"Two Tickets to Ten Strike" with Connie Stevens is a hybrid of comedy, mystery and action drama spotlighting Adam West spouting amazing dialogue as an amusingly verbose villain insistently threatening Bret.

A gunshot criminal confesses to Bret with his dying breath that an innocent man was locked up in jail for a murder that he didn't commit, spurring the epic odyssey "The Long Hunt."

Other memorable solo episodes with Moore include "Red Dog" with Lee Van Cleef and John Carradine, and "Kiz" with Kathleen Crowley and Peggy McCay.

Notable solo episodes with Kelly as Bart Maverick include "The Jeweled Gun" with Kathleen Crowley; "The Third Rider" with Dick Foran; the aforementioned "The Savage Hills" with Diane Brewster as Samantha Crawford; "Iron Hand" with Robert Redford in a major supporting role, his first screen acting appearance; the ominously suspenseful "Last Stop: Oblivion" with Buddy Ebsen; "Betrayal" with Patricia "Pat" Crowley and Ruta Lee; and "Substitute Gun" with Coleen Gray and Joan Marshall.

Roy Huggins quit the series at the end of the second season due to a life-threatening bout with pneumonia, and was succeeded by writer/producer Coles Trapnell, ushering in a gradual but sharp permanent decline in ratings.

The TV movie The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1991) includes a cameo by Kelly as Bart Maverick along with other actors from various earlier Western television series, including Gene Barry as Bat Masterson, Hugh O'Brian as Wyatt Earp, Chuck Connors as the Rifleman, Johnny Crawford as his son Mark, David Carradine as Caine from Kung Fu, Brian Keith from The Westerner, James Drury and Doug McClure as a thinly disguised Virginian and Trampas, and Clint Walker as Cheyenne Bodie.