The Dick Van Dyke Show is the best American sitcom of the 1960s, but Green Acres is by all odds the funniest. Somewhat unfortunately lumped in with CBS’s other, lesser rural comedies of the time, notably The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction, from which it was spun off, Green Acres is most definitely not the show it initially appears to be.
The basic premise, wealthy New Yorkers move to a ramshackle farmhouse, was the inverse of Beverly Hillbillies, a one-joke sitcom run into the ground by the end of its first season, while also springing from the same basic concept that began with The Egg and I (1947), with Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert playing essentially the same roles later essayed by Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor on Green Acres. That movie also introduced Ma & Pa Kettle and their brood, an uncultured backwoods family that…Read the entire review
