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Green Acres was an American television series that was produced by Filmways, Inc. and originally broadcast on CBS from 1965 to 1971. Today Sony Pictures Television owns the rights to the series (unlike its progenitor, Petticoat Junction, which is syndicated by Paramount).
After the tremendous success of The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction, CBS offered producer Paul Henning another half-hour on the schedule with no pilot required. Lacking the time to commit to another project himself, he encouraged colleague Jay Sommers to create the series. Sommers used his 1950 radio series, Granby's Green Acres, as the basis for the new television series. The 13-episode radio series had starred Gale Gordon and Bea Benaderet as a big-city family who move to the country, where their hired hand (a man in his late 40s) is named Eb, and the general store is run by a Mr. Kimball.[1]
Green Acres featured Eddie Albert as Oliver Wendell Douglas, a rich and successful New York attorney who was acting on his lifelong dream to be a farmer, and Eva Gabor as Lisa Douglas, his glamorously bejeweled Hungarian wife, dragged unwillingly from the privileged city life she adored to a bucolic life on a ramshackle farm.
Ostensibly a reverse Beverly Hillbillies, after the first few episodes the series shifted from a run-of-the-mill rural comedy and developed an absurdist world of its own. Though there were still many episodes that were standard 1960s sitcom fare, the show became notable for its surreal aspects that frequently included satire. They also had an appeal to children due to the slapstick, silliness and schtick, though adults are able to appreciate it on a different level. Its premise is sometimes compared to that of 1982–90 Newhart, though Newhart had no slapstick and was more cerebral.
It was set in the same fictional universe as Henning's other rural television comedies Petticoat Junction and The Beverly Hillbillies, featuring such picturesque towns as Hooterville, Pixley, Crabwell Corners and Stankwell Falls. The shows even shared characters on occasion.
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