Used to watching the show I thought it was just the town of Hooterville that was a Twilight Zonish, surreal place...BUT watching the show now, when the characters leave Hooterville and make trips to New York, Washington and places like that....people and reality there seem just as "off". The most notable was the Eiffel Tower being in Washington as Oliver looks in disbelief.

I guess the 'oddness' of Hooterville and other locales depended on where the Douglases happened to be- especially considering how UN-odd "Petticoat Junction" was.

The only odd things that happened on "Petticoat Junction" was when some weird guest took the broken elevator from the lobby to the guest rooms. Oh, and on an early episode Dennis Hopper guested as a supposed beatnik Bobby Jo was smitten with but that character looked more like Wally Cleaver than counterculture type (contrast that with Robbie Douglas's beatnik M3S episode that very same year- 1964!). Yeah a working broken elevator and a beatnik as square as Wally Cleaver didn't compare to all of 'Green Acres' antics!

I always figured the rest of the world operated like a conventional sitcom but only Hooterville operated like a surreal sitcom.

Generally when visitors come to the farm they take the role of the straight man like Oliver, hopelessly pointing out the abnormalities and trying to rationalize the weirdness.

Whenever the Douglases travel somewhere else the people are definitely unusual but never at quite the same level as the Hooterville natives.

Well, Mr. Ed was pretty out there in a lot of the episodes. When you think about it the Bob Newhart Show and Newhart were both pretty surreal too. But it's hard to think of any show dafter than Green Acres.

Well, Mr. Ed was pretty out there in a lot of the episodes. When you think about it the Bob Newhart Show and Newhart were both pretty surreal too. But it's hard to think of any show dafter than Green Acres.

I think Get Smart was that type of "surreal" also later movies like Naked Gun and Airplane are like that. I think Naked Gun and Airplane could have taken place in the same Green Acres universe lol

Good question

Perhaps it was Oliver's thinking/POV that was surreal. Hooterville was perfectly normal to its citizens.

Oliver's mother, his law partner, and Uncle Joe saw Oliver as the crazy one. Maybe they were right?

Well, I tell you what I eventually concluded about a dozen or so years ago.

There definitely is a contrast in cultures, where members from either side are self assured that they and their peers "get it", while their counterparts from the other side are "dreadfully misguided".
What it reminds me most of are areas along the Canada/US border where populations from both sides interact frequently.

That knowing,.. behind-the-back stare of "oh, here's another one", regardless of which side you are on.