Green Acres
 "Darlink I love you, but give me Park Avenue . . .
"
TV producer Paul Henning had already struck gold with his rural
sitcoms The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction
when he was approached by writer Jay Sommers, suggesting Henning
make a TV version of his 13-episode 1950 CBS radio series Granby's
Green Acres (itself based on S J Perelman's 1942 book Acres
And Pains).
Henning saw the potential in the idea, a mirror-image format to
The Beverly Hillbillies, with powerful New York City lawyer
Oliver Douglas (Eddie Albert) and his socialite wife Lisa (Eva
Gabor, sister of Zsa Zsa) leaving Manhattan for the countryside
and having to come to terms with the rather primitive conditions
of their new rural home just outside Hooterville, Illinois -
fictional home of Petticoat Junction.
Lisa feared she'd be a fish-out-of-water in the country,
missing her beloved Park Avenue shops, but hubby Oliver was
hell-bent on enjoying the rural pleasures that Hooterville offered
and persuaded his wife to move away from her beloved New York.
The twist was that when they arrived in their new home it was
Lisa who quickly adapted to the backwater, easily making friends
and solving country problems with her big city solutions.
 Seriously
scatty, it was almost as if she was oblivious to her surroundings
and continued to live exactly as she had in Manhattan.
Lawyer Oliver, on the other hand, despite his willingness to
live as a son of the soil, never quite pulled it off, failing to
master the country dwellers' insane logic, although Lisa grasped
it easily.
Oliver was destined to become the ultimate straight man in a
hick town whose bizarre residents pushed rural behaviour to
surreal limits.
Although Green Acres made occasional references to The
Beverly Hillbillies and shared a general store with Petticoat
Junction, this series was in a class by itself and easily
surpassed the other two comedies.
While the lead characters were capable enough it was the
fantastic collection of finely cast minor characters that gave Green
Acres most of its appeal - folks such as the quirkily-voiced
conman Haney, county agent Hank Kimball, gormless handyman Eb,
bumbling house builders Alf Monroe and his sister Ralph, pig
farmer Fred Ziffel and his wife who treated their pet pig Arnold
as if it were their son, and many others.
But there was also much playfulness involving the TV medium
itself. For example, screen credits occasionally appeared on
unusual props (like the local newspaper), and characters regularly
made references to other TV shows.
All in all, Green Acres was closer to Twin Peaks
and Northern Exposure than to traditional sitcoms, although
it sported a high groan factor of terrible puns and malapropisms
usually delivered by Lisa in her thick Hungarian accent, and a
generous quota of in-jokes and running gags - Lisa's hotcakes,
Oliver's speeches, the oddball electricity system, the bedroom
wall building that was never finished, and plenty more.
On 18 May 1990 CBS aired a two-hour TV movie, Return
To Green Acres, with Eddie Albert, Eva Gabor and many of the
remaining original cast re-creating their earlier roles.
In this, Oliver and Lisa prevent a ruthless real-estate
tycoon from razing Hooterville in order to build a city of mini-malls,
homes, parking lots and fast-food restaurants.
A Green Acres movie for the big screen was also
planned in the late 1990s, with Bette Midler allegedly cast in the Eva
Gabor role. It failed to materialise.
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