I watched Petticoat Junction and the spin off Beverly Hillbillies.
I never could enjoy Green Acres. It portrayed all the supporting characters as dumb and incompetent.
A lot of humor could have been mined from a city slicker trying to learn to farm. But instead they made everybody Oliver met stupid and incompetent. Starting with the man & woman he hired to remodel the farmhouse. Even the telephone installers were too lazy to install the phone inside the house.
Apparently there wasn’t a farm equipment dealer anywhere near Hooterville. Oliver drove that junk tractor the whole series.
The final straw for me was the episode where Oliver sues Haney. Yes, the judge and the other lawyer was incompetent too. I quit watching after that.
I enjoyed Petticoat Junction because it didn’t disrespect the characters. They were funny without being slapstick buffoons. Even some of the Beverly Hillbillies characters had a shrewd dignity. Jed was no fool. Jethro was the main idiot in that show.
As a person living in a rural area , I felt Green Acres was just insulting.
Did you like Green Acres? Did you grow up in a rural area?
Nick at Nite used to have a Green Acres promo that declared “It’s not dopey! It’s surreal!!”
I always liked it. I realized it was a farce and real people didn’t really act that way (I was 5 when the show debuted).
Loved Green Acres as a kid. I love it even more now. Lisa, the sophisticated city girl, adapted to farm life even better than her husband. I looked forward to the wild surrealism of Hooterville every week.
It was like a comedic Twilight Zone.
I think the show meant to be profoundly absurd and not demeaning to rural folk. It’s like Oliver walked into an alternate universe. Like the time Lisa made Oliver “hotskabobs” for breakfast, pancake bits on a skewer. Eb walks in and to Oliver’s amazement, says “Oh boy, hotskabobs!” Then Oliver discovers that Lisa had used one of his tractor parts for a skewer, he goes to Mr. Drucker’s store and describes the part. Drucker says “you could just use one of these hotskabob skewers” and pulls one off a rack. Just silly and ridiculous. I don’t think the intent was to insult, it’s just an over the top farce.
It was pretty much the low point of 60s TV, much more so than *Gilligan’s Island.
*
comedic Twilight Zone
I like that. 
That sums up Green Acres. I can’t think of another show that was that zany. It was like every norm was turned inside out and tossed on its head.
How many times did Haney sucker Oliver into buying some worthless junk? Any rational person would have wised up after awhile.
It always impressed me as being a “one-trick pony” kind of show, as in ‘how the backwoods hicks fluster and confuse the city slickers this week’. Amusing once or twice, but not over a long season. Got to have some variety.
IMHO as always. YMMV.
“Oh boy, hot water soup!”
I loved it. The key is that it was deliberately absurd as well as surreal. And you have it reversed: Oliver was the stupid one. He never understood that reality stopped at the Hooterville County line. He actually thought that there was no Eiffel Tower in Washington, DC! 
The other residents (and Lisa) understood that life there was surreal.
As for intelligence, Mr. Haney consistently outsmarted Douglas, and all the others always knew better them him in the end. Douglas was ignorant about life on the farm in every way.
They also used running gage brilliantly. Once established, they would be presented with a single shot, or the absurdity would be treated as perfectly normal.
As for your other complaints, they were done to be funny. If you had your way, there’d be nothing to laugh at.
I grew up in what was technically a rural area, btw, across from a potato farm.
Also, the pig didn’t grow.
yes, I did and I still do when I’m in the mood for it.
and Eddie Albert was a wonderful actor: did you ever see him in Roman Holiday?
Nope. Although they were created by the same man, Paul Henning, The Beverly Hillbillies debuted a year earlier than Petticoat Junction.
As I kid, I hated that it made fun of rural living. I knew NO people as dumb as those in Hootersville. We had better tractors! Our phone was inside! We were educated!
When I was older, it was explained to me that GA was supposed to be a “rural Twilight Zone” (I like that. But without menace.). Everyone in town knew what was going on at the Douglass’ (because they were watching Green Acres on TV). When Lisa watches the end credits go by, that’s a clue.
I have The Hooterville Handbook. It explains a lot I missed.
I’m not saying it is a high quality show. It’s still stupid. But it is an intelligent stupid!
Do do do doot doot. DOOT DOOT!
Apparently, he shares that syndrome with Keanu the kitten.
I liked that Lisa, who didn’t want to move out to the country in the first place, got on so much better with the Hootervillians and was on the same wavelength with them, while her husband remained clueless.
Although I haven’t seen it in years, I remember liking it better than The Beverly Hillbillies or Petticoat Junction.
I kind of liked Green Acres when I was young, but find it unwatchable now. In this category are F-Troop, That Girl, The Munsters, McHale’s Navy, Family Affair, Mr Ed, My Favorite Martian and The Beverly Hillbillies.
Somehow Hogan’s Heroes I still find entertaining and Get Smart & The Addams Family are very good. Meanwhile the Dick Van Dyke Show I placed towards the very apex of sitcoms.
Not loved, but tolerable in small doses are Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched, Andy Griffith Show & I Dream of Jeannie.
I never really liked Gomer Pyle, Petticoat Junction, The Beaver, Hazel, My 3 Sons or Father Knows Best.
I think that is a fairly complete list of 60s sitcoms shown in syndication in the 70s.
I left off the 50s & 70s ones.
Regarding the part of them portraying them all as stupid, I think that was supposed to be Douglas’ big city perspective. He’s close minded, and even though he was the one who wanted a farm, he saw everybody in Hooterville as dumb hicks and everything they did as stupid. I’ve met people like that. I remember being in a carpool once with someone who gazed around at the lovely woods and farmland we were passing through and commented about how it was so desolate. “People should build stuff here, because this is such a waste of space!” :rolleyes:
I did find it adorable how Zsa Zsa portrayed the spoiled rich woman who is just batty enough to actually embrace the nuttiness around her and find a way to fit in.
Wonderful absurdist comedy. Pure situation comedy, no real character development, no complicated emotional circumstances, just the basic gags. Well done for what it was, but unlikely such a simplistic format would work that well again.
Eva Gabor, not Zsa Zsa. Eva will not harm you.