Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 15, 1993 TAG: 9404130009
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN CARMAN SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Properly chastised, the TV industry went straight back to the drawing board and, barely a year later, CBS answered with ... ``The Beverly Hillbillies.''
Out of it came a'bubbling more than oil. The show shot straight to the top of the Nielsen rating chart in its first season and stayed there for another year.
Flayed by critics and adjudged by intellectuals as the final nail in the television coffin - this show cinched it; the Golden Age of Television was dead as a possum on a greased skillet - ``The Beverly Hillbillies'' gushed along for nine moronic seasons on CBS.
Beginning today, the public is invited to relive those glorious inanities of 1960s television, as ``The Beverly Hillbillies'' joins the growing roster of old TV shows retrofitted into new movies.
``Star Trek,'' ``Dragnet,'' ``The Addams Family,'' ``The Fugitive'' and a few other TV chestnuts already have made the transition.
``The Flintstones'' arrives soon after ``The Beverly Hillbillies'' and, God help us, ``Gilligan's Island'' is in the pipeline somewhere.
``The Beverly Hillbillies'' opens today in Roanoke. Jim Varney is in the old Buddy Ebsen role, as Jed Clampett. Cloris Leachman is Granny, Dabney Coleman is the banker Milburn Drysdale, Lily Tomlin is bank employee Jane Hathaway, Diedrich Bader is Jethro, and Erika Eleniak is Elly May.
If the movie is true to the TV show, the cast members will be stupid. But ``Beverly Hillbillies'' wasn't stupid on a one-note theme. No, these people glorified stupidity in several of its brighter shades.
Granny was superstitious, and stupid in the old way of being stupid. When Elly May dated a Navy frogman, Granny never quite got the man part of it separated from the frog.
Jed was stupid in a foxy way. He compensated with common sense.
Jethro was stupid in the empty attic sense. Elly May was naive, a combustible attribute for someone who strained her blouses and jeans to full hormonal alert status.
The beauty of ``The Beverly Hillbillies'' was that the Clampetts, good-hearted but dumb as oxen, were really a darn sight smarter than the snooty bank types who tried to civilize them.
Most of the laughs came at the expense of stuffed shirts. That's a message the television viewing public has rewarded more than once.
While ``The Beverly Hillbillies'' was widely accepted as broad proof of all that was wrong with TV, it kept spawning more of its ilk. Encouraged by the ratings success of ``The Andy Griffith Show'' and ``The Beverly Hillbillies,'' CBS eventually added ``Petticoat Junction,'' ``Green Acres,'' ``Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C,'' ``The Baileys of Balboa,'' ``Gilligan's Island'' and ``Hee Haw'' to its schedule.
The CBS schedule developed a distinct barnyard odor, an odd and occasionally uncomfortable circumstance for a ``Tiffany'' network run by chairman William S. Paley and the patrician president of CBS TV, Princeton graduate Jim (The Smiling Cobra) Aubrey.
But Paley defended ``The Beverly Hillbillies.'' He once said that ``people would make some snide remark about `Beverly Hillbillies.' ... They regard me as a sophisticated man with good taste. `Gee, how could you put a program like ``Beverly Hillbillies'' on the air?' they'd ask. ... What's wrong with `The Beverly Hillbillies'? I like it very much. I happen to like slapstick comedy. It makes me laugh.''
The show's ratings inevitably slid, and it finally dropped out of the top-20 list in the 1970-71 season, its last. But it wasn't declining ratings so much as a combination of Madison Avenue and the United States government that finally killed ``The Beverly Hillbillies.''
Madison Avenue was refining its approach to TV advertising, zoning in on younger, urban demographics.
Meanwhile, the FCC, in an effort to promote local programming, limited the hours of network programming with the Prime Time Access rule, which took effect in 1971. The networks were forced to trim their schedules; ``The Beverly Hillbillies'' was among the shows to be cut.
Today we have the Prime Time Access rule to thank for ``A Current Affair,'' ``Entertainment Tonight,'' ``Wheel of Fortune'' and a bundle of other syndicated shows that are emphatically non-local in origin, but that's another story.
``The Beverly Hillbillies'' eventually had the last chortle. Not only has it been deemed worthy of a big-screen revival, it's still airing on TV.
And you know what? Compared to much of the videotaped sludge that passes for brand new network comedy these days, ``The Beverly Hillbillies'' doesn't look half bad.
by CNB