US
Producer
Born in Independence, Missouri,
U.S.A., 16 September
1911.
Throughout
the 1960s, Paul Henning was the
creative mastermind behind three
of the most successful sitcoms
on television: The Beverly
Hillbillies (1962), Petticoat
Junction (1963), and Green Acres
(1965)--all of which were
narratively interthreaded, and
the first of which was perhaps
the most successful network
series ever.
A perpetual Midwesterner who
spent 30 years in Hollywood in
both radio and television, his
basic country mouse/city mouse
formula never veered far from
his rural roots. Once those
roots were deemed passe´ by the
demographics avatars, his exile
from television was both sudden
and emphatic.
When a radio spec script he'd
written on a whim was accepted
by The Fibber McGee and Molly
Show, he began a 15-year career
as a series staff writer,
culminating with Burns and Allen
on radio and then television,
where he became a protege of
future Tonight Show director
Fred de Cordova. On TV, he
launched both The Bob Cummings
Show (1955-61, all three
networks), wherein a pre-Dobie
Gillis Dwayne Hickman
assimilates the Southern
California decadence of his
starlet-addled bachelor uncle
through a filter of Midwestern verities. But it was The Beverly
Hillbillies (1962-71, CBS), with
which he made both his name and
fortune. Equal parts Steinbeck
and absurdism, the nouveau
riche-out-of-water Clampetts
populated the top-rated program
of their premier season,
remained in the top ten
throughout the rest of the
decade, and had regular weekly
episode ratings which rivaled those of Super Bowls.
The Clampett clan initially
hailed from an indeterminate
backwoods locale somewhere along
(in author David Marc's words)
"the fertile crescent that
stretches from Hooterville to
Pixley and represents Henning's
sitcomic Yoknapatawpha." As
explained in the opening montage
and theme song, Lincolnesque
patriarch Jed (Buddy Ebsen)
inadvertently stumbles onto an
oil fortune languishing just
beneath his worthless tract of
scrub oak and brambles, and
pursues his destiny westward to
swank Beverly Hills, in the
interest of suitable escorts for
daughter Elly May (Donna
Douglas) and employment
prospects for wayward nephew
Jethro (Max Baer, Jr.). In tow
(in a sight gag from The Grapes
of Wrath, no less) is Granny
(Irene Ryan), carried out to the
truck at the last second in her
favorite rocker.
In this way, the Clampetts
inadvertently echoed the
fascination of a rural
population newly wired for
television with the purveyors of
TV's content--at least partially
accounting for their
corresponding popularity.
Meanwhile, Henning quickly moved
to fashion several spinoffs with
characters in common. Petticoat
Junction (1963-70, CBS) featured
long-time Henning player Bea
Benaderet as Kate Bradley,
proprietress of the Shady Grove
Hotel, a homey inn situated
along a railroad spur between
Hooterville and Pixley, with her
three budding daughters
providing ample latitude for
farmer's daughter jokes. The
show was cancelled in 1970
following Benaderet's death from
cancer.
Then into this homespun idyll,
he dropped Green Acres (1965-71,
CBS), a flat-out assault on
Cartesian logic, Newtonian
physics, and Harvard-centrist
positivism. Lawyer Oliver
Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert)
and his socialite wife Lisa (Eva
Gabor) come to Hooterville in
search of the greening of
America and a lofty Jeffersonian
idealism. What they discover
instead is a virtual parallel
universe of unfettered
surrealism, rife with gifted
pigs, square chicken eggs, and
abiogenetic hotcakes--a universe
which Lisa intuits immediately,
and by which Oliver is
constantly bewildered.
In their later stages, these
three worlds were increasingly interwoven, so that by the time
of the holiday episodes where
the arriviste Clampetts return
to Hooterville to visit kith and
kin, including the laconic
Bradleys,
and intersect with the
proto-revisionist Douglases--using
Sam Drucker's General Store as
their narrative
spindle--television had perhaps
reached its self-reflexive
pinnacle.
Despite high ratings, both The
Beverly Hillbillies and Green
Acres were canceled in 1971 by
CBS President James Aubrey (once
nicknamed "the smiling
cobra") in the same purge
which claimed Mayberry RFD, a
toothless Jackie Gleason, and
Red Skelton (despite a final
season on NBC). The push to
cultivate a consumer base of
advertising-friendly 18- to
34-year-olds was the same one
which ushered in M*A*S*H, All in
the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore
Show, and, ostensibly, political conscience. Yet viewed in
retrospect, such shows perhaps
perfectly mirrored the times. A
pervasive argument against
television has always been that
its hermetic nature removes it
from a social context: Idealized
heroes or families and their
better mousetrap worlds seem all
but impervious to the greater
ills of the day. Nowhere is this
more evident or egregious (so
the argument goes) than in 1960s
sitcoms, where a watershed
decade elicited programming
which seemed downright extraordinary in its
mindlessness. But who better
than garrulous
nags, crusty aliens, maternal
jalopies, suburban witches, subservient genies, gay Marines
or bungling Nazis to dramatize
the rend in the social fabric,
or typify the contradictions of
the age?
If so, no one was more adept at
manipulating this conceit--nor pushed the envelope of casual
surrealism further--than
Henning. Not for nothing did
button-down visionary Oliver
Douglas, whose plans for Cornell
School of Agriculture were
dashed by his father's
insistence on a Harvard Law
degree, lose his first law
office job for growing mushrooms
in his desk drawer.
Special "Return Of" TV
movies were created for both The
Beverly Hillbillies (1981) and
Green Acres (1990), and a
Beverly Hillbillies feature film
followed in 1992, but none of
these, charitably speaking,
managed to rise to the
challenge.
-Paul Cullum
