Maverick: The Complete Second Season

The classic witty Western starring James Garner and Jack Kelly as brothers Bret and Bart Maverick, professional gamblers and wily charmers always playing the odds with cards, money, and women, hit its stride in the second season. The guys have a gift for filling an inside straight on a rigged hand—or bluffing their opponent into thinking they have. They're also unlikely heroes, taking on cheats, swindlers, criminal tycoons, corrupt lawmen, and various other crooked elements of the cattle towns and frontier burgs and riverboat gaming rooms they pass through on their poker-table tour of the Old West. If they manage to make a little profit from their labors, that's a bonus; just as often they come out even, riding off to find another game and bet on another fortune. The two stars trade off leading-man duties, but the best chapters pair them in situations where, despite their competitive streak, they have each other's backs. Roger Moore, who would go on to play their British cousin, Beau, in the fourth season, guest stars here as a playboy who swaps places with Bret in “The Rivals,” while other guest stars include Martin Landau, Louise Fletcher, Dan Blocker, Robert Conrad, and Clint Eastwood. Older viewers will enjoy the knowing humor as Maverick plays off the conventions of traditional TV Westerns (the episode “Gun-Shy” offers a fine spoof of Gunsmoke, with Ben Gage as Marshal Mort Dooley). Compiling all 26 episodes from the 1958-59 second season, this is recommended. (S. Axmaker)