Green Acres

Green Acres (1965-71, CBS), in the words of author David Marc, is "as utterly self-reflexive as any program ever aired on network TV." The gifted child of television mastermind Paul Henning, who made his name and fortune on The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres was a spinoff created in conjunction with Jay Sommers, based on his original radio series Granby's Green Acres. Yet despite its folksy origins, and in an age which routinely produced garrulous nags, crusty aliens, flying nuns, suburban witches, maternal jalopies, and coconut-powered shortwaves, Green Acres stands proudly as the furthest point on the envelope of television's psychedelic era.

Reversing the narrative hook of The Beverly Hillbillies (city folks come to the country), Green Acres simultaneously managed to nosedive off the edge of the known world. Prestigious lawyer Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert) and his socialite wife Lisa (Eva Gabor) trade in their exhausting Park Avenue existence for the simple country pleasures, which they imagine await them wrapped in a cloak of Jeffersonian idealism, glorious sunrises, and the smell of new-mown hay. What they find instead is a consensus reality which flies in the face of Cartesian logic, Newtonian physics, and Harvard-sanctioned positivism. Albert, who made his film debut in Brother Rat opposite Ronald Reagan, takes refuge in the same reductionist platitudes his former co-star eventually learned to trade on quite deftly, but they ultimately prove no match. Meanwhile, Gabor (who with her sisters Zsa Zsa and Magda had by this time been dubbed "mythological" by Dorothy Parker) embraces this new order with a circular instinct worthy of Gracie Allen herself (Henning's long-time employer). Against all odds, Lisa flourishes--coaxing the chickens to lay square eggs, bringing a world-class symphony conductor to Hooterville, establishing a state-of-the-art beauty salon in Sam Drucker's General Store, and of course, perfecting her signature biological weapons-grade hotcakes.

Also populating this wrinkle in critical reason are a healthy cross-section of supporting eccentrics. These include: Mr. Haney (Pat Buttram), the hornswaggling con man whose bargains invariably cost the Douglases several times their face value. Buttram once served as Gene Autry's sidekick, and claims he based his character loosely on Col. Tom Parker, Elvis Presley's legendary shadowy manager, whom he had known as a carnival entrepreneur in the 1940s, where he ran a booth featuring dancing chickens. County Agent Hank Kimball (Alvy Moore) "discourses on plant and animal husbandry rival those of a semiotics professor" (according to Marc, and personifies a kind of infinite regress, where every empirical statement branches into multiple statements that in turn preclude it, spiraling each new observation back and away from itself like an inductive Escherism. Fred and Doris Ziffle (Hank Patterson and Barbara Pepper; later Fran Ryan) are the beaming parents of Arnold, a 250-pound adolescent pig who watches television, is writing a book, visits Washington on scholarship, and ultimately falls in love with Mr. Haney's pet basset hound.

Green Acres was canceled in 1971 when CBS consciously targeted a younger demographic audience and purged its so-called "rural comedies." Its user-friendly absurdism became one of the cornerstones of the mock-patriotic revivalism of the Nickelodeon Channel's "Nick at Night" lineup in the early 1990s.

-Paul Cullum

CAST

Oliver Wendell Douglas.......................... Eddie Albert

Lisa Douglas............................................ Eva Gabor

Mr. Haney.............................................. Pat Buttram

Eb Dawson............................................. Tom Lester

Hank Kimball.......................................... Alvy Moore

Fred Ziffel........................................ Hank Patterson

Doris Ziffel (1965-1969)..................... Barbara Pepper

Dorris Ziffel (1969-1970)............................ Fran Ryan

Sam Drucker.......................................... Frank Cady

Newt Kiley (1965-1970).......................... Kay E. Kuter

Alf Monroe (1966-1969)............................. Sid Melton

Ralph Monroe (1966-1971)........... Mary Grace Canfield

Darlene Wheeler (1970-1971)............. Judy McConnell

PRODUCERS

Paul Henning, Jay Sommers

PROGRAMMING HISTORY

170 Episodes

CBS

September 1965-September 1968   Wednesday 9:00-9:30

September 1968-September 1969   Wednesday 9:30-10:00

September 1969-September 1970   Saturday 9:00-9:30

September 1970-September 1971   Tuesday 8:00-8:30