The Weird History of Hillbilly TV

[TMC]

http://bittersoutherner.com/the-weir...f-hillbilly-tv

While searching for another success like “The Andy Griffith Show,” CBS turned to one of that show’s past writers. Paul Henning won a time slot with a sitcom about a family of Ozarks hillbillies who strike oil and move to Los Angeles. Joining the lineup two years after Griffith, “The Beverly Hillbillies” had none of the subtlety of Sheriff Taylor's banter with Deputy Fife and none of the sweetness of a chat between Opie and his dad. Henning told the press he rejected a network request to put more “heart” into his scripts. His was a slapstick show.

Critics didn't like it.

“If television is America’s vast wasteland, ‘the Hillbillies’ must be Death Valley,” went one often cited review of the show. It didn't matter to viewers. The show was No. 1 in its first season. Its theme song, performed by bluegrass legends Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, topped the charts, too. The Saturday Evening Post declared that the wasteland was a cornfield.

Some producers were trying to end all the wasteland talk for good. “East Side/West Side” debuted on CBS in 1963 and starred George C. Scott as a New York social worker and, in a rare-for-the-time recurring role for an African-American actor, Cicely Tyson as his secretary. But CBS saw corn as the safer investment. "East Side/West Side" lasted one season, and it gave Henning room in its lineup for another show: “Petticoat Junction,” set between Pixley and Hooterville — the two towns in the Ozarks the Clampetts had left. The next year, Gomer Pyle left Mayberry to join the Marines, and viewers at home could follow his adventures each week on “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” Another Henning production, “Green Acres,” went on air in 1965 with the story of a wealthy banker who grew tired of Manhattan life and moved with his glamorous wife to someplace more authentic, located just outside of Hooterville.

At this point, CBS was juggling five comedies about characters in or from two different regions of the South, but it’s doubtful many viewers knew the difference. The necessary broadness required for TV merged the Ozarks and Appalachia into one rustic concept, incorporating all the land in between the mountains into a single “other.”

In Nashville, guitar superstar-qua-RCA record executive Chet Atkins was doing something similar with country music to make it more appealing to a mass audience. Atkins took the drums and electricity of postwar honky tonk and smoothed them out; he dialed back the whine of the steel guitar and turned the fiddles into string sections. Without its previous signature instrumentation, country became more of a feeling than fixed geography. “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” was one of the twangiest, most geographically specific songs on the charts when it hit No. 1.



The rural shows did more than obscure regional differences. They also erased the dark side that had long been a part of the hillbilly stereotype.

"[Hillbillies] can be seen as rugged pioneers and stalwart and having a very keen sense of family and closeness to the land and folk wisdom," Harkins says, but "the flip side of that is inbreeding and bestiality and sexual aberrance of various kinds. Rugged stalwart pioneers are sort of drunken and violent and uncontrollable. Closeness to the land is also poverty and backwardness and barefooted-ness and disease.”

There was to be no aberrant sex with the Clampetts. Henning claimed to have studied Ozarks culture, and he rejected the duality of the hillbilly with his shows. "Beverly Hillbillies" executive producer Al Simon told The Saturday Evening Post, “Our hillbillies are wonderful, clean, wholesome people,” then added he wanted the show to redefine the word.

That wasn't all it was redefining. In an episode called "The South Rises Again," Granny becomes convinced that a nearby Civil War film shoot is the real war, which she refuses to accept ever ended. Jed lets it play out. Granny, Jethro, and Elly May drive around Los Angeles waving a Confederate flag. Mister Drysdale, the banker, joins in, calling himself Gen. Milburn Beauregard Nathan Bedford Stonewall Drysdale and preparing to charge into battle before ultimately chickening out. Eventually, Granny shoots the actor playing Grant with a gun loaded full of cookies (it was a family show), and the episode ends with her and the actor drunkenly singing “Dixie” back at the Clampetts’ mansion.

The episode did for the South what TV did for the rural stereotype — it took out the danger but kept a version of the culture. The neo-Confederate makes peace with the Yankee. No one is hurt. Granny gets to hang on to the Lost Cause and the only villain is the citified banker whose actions are driven by greed and cowardice, compared to Granny’s truth and honor. (The lower-class Granny's authentic superiority to the upper-crust, phony Mr. Drysdale sends a message about the perceived inherent value of lower-class whites, too.)

“The shows erase the truth of the Southern states by de-Southernizing it,” Harkins says. “It’s a way of reframing the South as a place of tranquility and peace . . . because it’s all white, because race has been removed from its identity.”



It's unlikely Henning or anyone at CBS read headlines about riots and protests, then believed a bunch of sitcoms about Southerners would speak to the race and class anxieties of middle-class white America. They were just chasing ratings by building on formulas that worked. If they needed to rely on stereotypes, they had to make them easy to digest.

With the twang out of the music and the teeth out of the hillbilly, the media “South” was pure comfort for the right type of person, as the theme to “Petticoat Junction” makes clear.

“Forget about your cares, it is time to relax at the Junction,” goes the song, as a small train chugs along a track, bound for Pixley. The scene cuts to a water tower where three country beauties and their dog are bathing.

“Lots of curves, you bet, and even more when you get . . . to the Junction.”

Lonesome Rhodes has a similar theme song. It’s a country jingle with fiddles and high mountain harmonies, and it would seem like a parody of the “Petticoat Junction” theme, had it not been released years earlier.

Even if they were strange or a little slow, the people who populated TV's rural landscape were still plain and lovable. And as the ratings showed, they were indeed loved.

Henning was careful with his actors. He advised the cast of “The Beverly Hillbillies” against appearing out-of-character in real life. The media "South" needed to extend to the real world.

By the late ’60s, this started to reverse. Reality was encroaching on TV comedy, mostly through variety shows. Richard Nixon appeared on NBC’s “Laugh-In” in 1968. The Smothers Brothers raised such anti-establishment mischief with their show that CBS asked to see each episode in advance to review for potentially offensive material.

There was still some gold in the hillbillies, though, and CBS wasn’t about to leave it behind. When Andy Griffith left his show, the network kept it running under the new name “Mayberry R.F.D.” Heading into 1969, it was No. 4 in the ratings. “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C” were in the top ten. “Laugh-In” was No. 1.

Looking at these ratings, the writers Frank Peppiatt and John Aylesworth "figured country humor plus musical numbers by that genre's biggest stars ought to be a sure thing," Aylesworth writes in his memoir. He can be forgiven for not remembering the Grand Ole Opry and other barn dance shows that had existed long before, because he admittedly wasn't familiar with country music. He and Peppiatt were Canadian, and while they didn't know country, they did know TV. They'd spent the last decade becoming go-to writers for variety shows, working with everyone from Judy Garland to Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass.

They pitched a variety show set in “a mythical place called Cornfield County," which could be in the South, based on the show's music and accents, or it could be in the Midwest or on the plains, based on the cornfields. Regardless, Cornfield County was in the media “South,” the country of country music under Chet Atkins — the symbolic place where rural, mountain, Southern, and Western were all the same.

With their pitch approved, Peppiatt and Aylesworth hired writers and performers who'd worked on country shows, including a handful of Opry regulars. Country music superstars Buck Owens and Roy Clark signed on to host. And for added realism, the team hired a relatively unknown Georgian named Junior Samples, who had made a couple of novelty records one of the other writers had heard. Samples embodied Henning's rule to stay in character because, by all accounts, he was playing himself. He wasn't Max Baer acting like Jethro Bodine in a rope belt on Rodeo Drive; he was an elementary school dropout who wore overalls and spoke with a deep drawl.

"What you see is what you get,” cast member Lulu Roman told me.

Samples' difficulty reading cue cards became a running joke on the show. When he took dozens of takes to deliver his response to a line about a man having two wives — “That’s not bigamy, that’s trigonometry” — the show kept in his breakups and stumbles.

[TMC]

The Beverly Hillbillies creator didn't care about critics

Critics hated it, Henning created it, and the fans kept it rated among the top.

[stevea]

The Beverly Hillbillies seem to be one of those shows that many either love or hate, leaving little room for the middle ground.

That, from the MeTV article. The country loved it, the "elite" critics hated it.

[biffbronson]

Do these writers actually WATCH an episode or two before going ON AND ON with their social commentary???

Quoting from the article:

"Another Henning production, “Green Acres,” went on air in 1965 with the story of a wealthy banker who grew tired of Manhattan life and moved with his glamorous wife to someplace more authentic, located just outside of Hooterville."

Banker??? The writer's credibility is questionable when not knowing that the story was about an attorney...

And a Petticoat Junction error for good measure:

"“Forget about your cares, it is time to relax at the Junction,” goes the song, as a small train chugs along a track, bound for Pixley."

The Cannonball was coming TO the Shady Rest Hotel -- "to the Junction" -- and NOT "bound for Pixley" in the opening. Pixley is nowhere near the hotel's location. WTF, it would've make no sense to show the train running and running without having the hotel as ITS DESTINATION!!! Stupid.