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Among the Hollywood figures who were honored in memoriam last month during the 75th Emmy Awards was Norman Lear. The iconic television writer, director, and producer passed away at 101 in December. Lear leaves in his wake a bevy of iconic television shows that defined his era and shaped the future of American popular culture. His role in U.S. television history also had a complex impact on how the nation sees — and doesn’t see — rural America.
Fifty-three years ago, Lear’s breakout hit, “All in the Family,” aired on CBS. A satire set in the New York City borough of Queens, the program made topical comedy out of the post-1960s culture wars. It also touched an immediate nerve. An instant hit, the program became the nation’s most-watched television show of its era. But Lear’s legacy is more complicated for rural Americans. His 1971 rise signaled the demise of rural America on network television.
“All in the Family’s” white-hot popularity spelled almost instantaneous doom for the show that immediately preceded it, “Hee Haw.” But the country music variety show was not the only rural-themed program on borrowed time. Airing on CBS on the same night as “Hee Haw” were “Green Acres” and “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Within a year, those programs, along with “Mayberry RFD,” “The Jim Nabors Hour,” “Petticoat Junction,” “Gomer Pyle,” and the “New Andy Griffith Show,” were canceled. Termed the “rural purge,” Norman Lear marked the end of an era.
In the early 1970s, Lear followed “All in the Family” with hits like “Maude,” “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons,” and “Sanford and Son.” These shows were defined by their urban settings, realism, and topical humor. By contrast, the programs canceled in the “rural purge” were wholly disconnected from the sturm-and-drang of the 1960s.
Sara K. Eskridge, Ph.D., believes “escape” was exactly the point. “I think they provided a sense of soothing,” said Dr. Eskridge, a historian who authored Rube Tube: CBS and Rural Comedy in the Sixties. “They were set in contemporary times. But they were focused on friendships. You don’t see conflict.”
Unlike Lear, who found comedy in social conflict and made shows that spoke to the moment, Eskridge said the rural-themed programs “were permanently in the past even when they were contemporary. They were not culturally relevant.”
In the 1960s, CBS so dominated television ratings with its rural-themed programming that critics dubbed it, the “Country Broadcasting System.” At television’s birth in the 1940s, CBS had also conquered the medium. But it did so with highly rated and critically acclaimed shows ranging from “I Love Lucy” to “The Twilight Zone.” Dubbed the “Tiffany Network,” for combining popularity and quality, CBS faced a changed television landscape by 1960.
In 1959, the network’s hit quiz show, “The $64,000 Question,” was embroiled in a rigging scandal.
In addition to this, technology had finally given rural Americans access to television. To please their expanded audience of urban and rural viewers, networks turned to Westerns. Popular with every demographic, the networks aired as many as 41 Westerns in one season of television programming.
With quiz shows discredited and Westerns saturated, CBS launched “The Andy Griffith Show” in October 1960. Combining the Western motif of the honest lawman with a tried-and-true comedy formula, CBS struck ratings gold. This runaway hit spawned a series of rural-themed television comedies ranging from the cornpone, “Beverly Hillbillies,” to the slightly postmodern, “Green Acres.” Critics may have moaned “the pone is the lowest form of humor,” but audiences disagreed. During the Kennedy presidency, “The Beverly Hillbillies” was America’s most watched television series.
Ironically, as American cities boomed in the 1960s so did rural-themed television programming. To Dr. Eskridge, “Nostalgia works great for this. The future was in the city and when people think ‘rural’ they think of the past.”
Brooks Blevins, Ph.D., understands the show’s popularity a bit differently. The Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University sees a timeless narrative thread in these programs. Dr. Blevins told me, “The rich fat cats are always the butt of the joke. And that has existed for as long as there has been humor.”
But Blevins also understands that once the tumult of the 1960s fully emerged, “these shows are escapism. You can’t deny that there is an escapist measure in these shows.”
To Tim Brook, a television critic, the programs relied upon the trope that “Rural America was like true America, without all the problems,” he wrote in the Bitter Southerner. But even Mayberry was not immune to the times. In 1967, “The Andy Griffith Show,” in a slight nod to contemporary events, finally featured its first African American character in a speaking part.
Ironically, it was integration that spawned the rural purge. During Jim Crow and segregation, African Americans were absent from television. In that time, Dr. Blevins claims it was “hillbillies” who played the role of the exotic “other.” Through these “non-threatening, non-conformist” characters, writers could “poke fun at American materialism in a non-leftist way.” When Norman Lear integrated television, African Americans became the “other” who held up the mirror to society; hillbillies were redundant.
Network executives were eager for a change. CBS president William Paley loathed the “Country Broadcasting Network” moniker. To fix it, in 1970, he hired 33-year-old Fred Silverman as head of network programming. Silverman also detested the rural comedies but now he had a rationale to cancel what were popular shows. The new Nielsen ratings measured viewer demographics, not just raw viewership. CBS dominated the ratings, but its rural, downscale viewers would never attract top advertising dollars.
Paley and Silverman sought to revive the “Tiffany Network” by producing prestige television that attracted a younger, educated, and urban audience. Lear’s “All in the Family” fit the bill. Within a year of its premiere, Silverman had, as one observer quipped, canceled every show “with a tree in it.”
In all, Silverman canned a dozen shows in the 1971 rural purge: “Green Acres,” “Petticoat Junction,” “Beverly Hillbillies,” “The Red Skelton Show,” “Family Affair,” “Hee-Haw,” “Hogan’s Heroes,” “Jim Nabors Hour,” “Mayberry RFD,” and “The New Andy Griffith Show.” Not even “Lassie” escaped Silverman’s hatchet. In 1973, Silverman’s Saturday night lineup, “All in the Family,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Bob Newhart,” “M*A*S*H,” and “The Carol Burnett Show,” came to be regarded as the greatest night of television in the medium’s history.
Norman Lear had blazed a trail for these programs to follow. He proved it was feasible to be “topical, funny and immensely popular.” But his success came at a cost. The “rural purge” was a tipping point for depictions of rural America in popular culture. Sure, “The Waltons,” “Lonesome Dove,” “The Dukes of Hazard,” and (now) “Yellowstone” are hit programs that center on rural life. But these are outliers. Rural America, when it is depicted at all, is too often a setting for horror movies or reality show rubes. Dr. Eskridge understands that many rural people feel ignored in popular culture. They ask, in her words, “Where am I in this melting pot?”
Christopher Ali, Ph.D., thinks the rural purge points to a deeper issue. Fred Silverman’s quest for the urban, educated middle class did not stop with network television. Today, media almost wholly ignores rural America. The Pioneers Chair in Telecommunications at Pennsylvania State University told me wide swaths of rural Americans now live in “double deserts.” They lack access to both broadband and reliable local news and media.
These “double deserts” pack a powerful social wallop. In Ali’s words, “The lack of representation of rural communities creates a terrible cycle. Rural communities are vibrant, rich, and diverse. But the lack of connectivity, news, and information are never good. It limits opportunity to learn and grow economically. It limits options. It can only be a bad thing. You end up in echo chambers without connectivity.”
Lear proved television could speak to the moment — and, at times, could help heal division. His passing reminds us that television and media ignore that legacy.
Jeffery H. Bloodworth is a professor of political history at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, and co-director of the university’s School of Public Service & Global Affairs. He is the author of the forthcoming book Heartland Liberal: The Life & Times of Speaker Carl Albert.
This article first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, recommendations, retrospectives, and more. Join the mailing list today to have future editions delivered straight to your inbox.
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