The Alaskans is a 1959–1960 ABC/Warner Bros. Western television series set during the late 1890s in the port of Skagway, Alaska. The show features Roger Moore as "Silky Harris" and Jeff York as "Reno McKee", a pair of adventurers intent on swindling travelers bound for the Yukon Territories during the height of the Klondike Gold Rush.[3] Their plans are inevitably complicated by the presence of singer "Rocky Shaw" (Dorothy Provine), "an entertainer with a taste for the finer things in life".[4]
The show was the first regular work on American television for the British actor Roger Moore.
The Alaskans is closely related to the ABC/WB series Maverick through broadcast and production. Maverick was the most prominent of ABC's Sunday night of Western dramas. For the 1959–60 season, Sundays began with Colt .45 and Maverick, then John Russell's Lawman and Nick Adams' The Rebel, and concluded with The Alaskans.[5]
For Roger Moore, the series was memorable for being his "most appalling television series ever". In particular, he found that attempting to recreate Alaskan exteriors on a studio backlot in California made for disagreeably hot work days.[6] The show also caused some marital strife for the actor when he had to admit to wife Dorothy Squires that he had fallen in love with co-star Dorothy Provine.[7]
Because of the 1960 Writers Guild of America strike as well as an ongoing Warner Bros. policy to save money on writers, The Alaskans inherited a certain amount of scripted material from Maverick. Moore bristled at the lack of originality in scripts: "An old Bronco script would interchange with an Alaskans or Maverick. In some cases, even the dialogue stayed unchanged."[7] In 2007, Moore noted, "Quite often I realized that we were filming Maverick scripts, with the names changed."[8] This made it simple for Jack L. Warner to envision Moore as Maverick, since Moore had literally delivered Garner's dialogue while reshooting the same scripts with different names and locales.
The same year that The Alaskans was canceled, James Garner left Maverick. Moore became, under protest,[7] Garner's replacement, playing Bret Maverick's cousin Beau Maverick in the fourth season of Maverick.
The Alaskans is scheduled to be released on Blu-ray by the Warner Archive Collection on August 27, 2024.[9]