The Hillbilly's any info out?
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Cdnjan

Friday, September 20, 2002 - 01:59 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
This sounds like a fun new show. Loved the old one. Does anyone have any info. about it.
Thanks
Jan

Twinkle

Tuesday, September 24, 2002 - 07:53 am EditMoveDeleteIP
There was an article about "The Real Beverly Hillbillies" in my local Sunday paper and I was able to find it online >>> click here.
The casting is being held in Arkansas, West Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky and local spokespeople are not at all happy with the apparent stereotyping involved in the casting process.

There are also plans for a reality version of "Green Acres", about which the article says, "producers are looking for a rich family willing to move from the big city to the boondocks."

I may be wrong, but it sounds like both shows are predicated on the assumption that country people (whatever that means) are a source of humor because they're a bunch of naive bumpkins.

Ryn

Friday, October 11, 2002 - 05:10 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
Found this article cached on google (no longer listed at CNN).

'Beverly Hillbillies' to become reality show
HOLLYWOOD, California (Reuters) --CBS is resurrecting "The Beverly Hillbillies" as a reality series, Variety reports.

The network will soon begin casting for a weekly half-hour series that will follow the adventures of a rural, lower-middle class family -- yes, there will be a granny -- as they are transplanted from their humble digs to a Beverly Hills mansion. The project is tentatively titled "Real Beverly Hillbillies."

During their one-year stay in California, they'll be afforded a wide variety of luxuries they'd normally be unable to afford, from maid service to personal assistants. They'll also have a chance to earn a substantial income each week, either via a stipend or through some other means.

Cameras will watch their every move as the rural clan attempts to fit in with folks who eat at the Grill rather than use a grill, or who shop at Harry Winston instead of Wal-Mart. And while the series will focus on a group of five or six, it's expected their extended family will also stop by for a visit sometime during their stay in the mansion.

CBS vice president of alternative programming Ghen Maynard said the series will have a humorous tone, though with a respect for the family and some elements of drama.

"It's a great fish-out-of-water story," he told Daily Variety. "A lot of it will be funny, but a lot of it will be real. We want to fnd a family that's different from what most people know but still relatable, a family that loves each other a lot."

The concept was pitched by producers Gary Auerbach and James Jones and veteran documentarian Dub Cornett, and CBS bought it almost immediately.

"It's rare that you hear an idea and in the first 30 seconds, you instantly get it," Maynard said. It helped that CBS still owns the right to the "Beverly Hillbillies" title.

Maynard said that while there will be "some structure" to the show, most plots will come naturally -- a la MTV's "The Osbournes" or E!'s "The Anna Nicole Show."

"Imagine the episode where they have to interview maids," he said.

Maynard said the show is not designed to mock the rural family, unlike scripted entertainment that often takes a dim view of that culture.

"The intent is to be respective but at the same time enjoy the humor that comes from the fish-out-of-water scenario of the show," he said. "We want a family who has a sense of humor about themselves."

Maynard expects to have several episodes of "Hillbillies" in the can before the show launches, but it's possible some future episodes will focus on how the fame of the Eye TV show further changes the clan.

While the family will be afforded numerous luxuries, they won't truly live like millionaires.

"It will be lavish, but not to the point of absurdity," Maynard said.

And while the new "Hillbillies" will borrow the overall structure of the original comedy, many elements of the first show will not be repeated. It's not a given, for example, that the family will get their own Miss Jane Hathaway.

A hotline is expected to be opened within days allowing potential families to audition for the show.

CBS aired the first "Beverly Hillbillies" from 1962 until 1971, producing 274 episodes. The series was one of the linchpins of the network's one-time dominance of rural communities, who tuned in for "Hillbillies," "Green Acres," "The Andy Griffith Show" and other countrified fare.

At one point, the show was TV's No. 1 program, attracting up to 60 million viewers weekly. Buddy Ebsen starred as Jed Clampett in the first "Beverly Hillbillies," while Irene Ryan played Granny.

Ryn

Friday, October 11, 2002 - 05:13 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
and an opinion piece...

http://www.nationalreview.com/dreher/dreher083002.asp


August 30, 2002 9:00 a.m.
Minstrel Show
Reality TV goes over the top at CBS.

What if a major television network sent out teams to search the Bronx, Compton, and the south side of Chicago looking for a large "multi-generational family" of poor black folks, who would move into a Beverly Hills mansion for a year? Cameras would follow the Negroes around, capturing their fish-out-of-water hijinks for the entertainment of millions of viewers, who will be invited to laugh as the urban rustics squirm and gawk in front of their social betters.

If that were true, there would be no end to the outrage over the racist exploitation and class denigration inherent in such a morally rancid enterprise. Jesse Jackson would be all over creation, raising hell about a media corporation sponsoring a minstrel show — and for once in my life, I'd have to agree with him.

In fact, this is a true story, but the hapless rubes CBS is searching out are not African Americans, but poor southern whites, the only ethnic group in the country that it is permissible to mock in polite company. It's for a reality-TV project to be titled, The Real Beverly Hillbillies. "We're looking for a family from a very rural area that hasn't been exposed to big-city life or luxuries of life in any way," a CBS spokesman told the Washington Post.

How charming. Ship the toothless poor white trash in from Appalachia, set them down amid immense luxury, and watch the dopes make inadvertent fools of themselves in front of the rich and beautiful. The Real Beverly Hillbillies they're calling it. Some fun that'll be. Yes sir, southern white people — the kind who tend to own guns, believe in God, love their country and vote Republican — are Hollywood's niggers.

Now, I don't want to get sanctimonious about this, because I have dined out many an evening on redneck stories from my rural southern childhood, which began in a house trailer off of Highway 61. My mom and dad grew up poor, but made it into the middle class through hard work, education, and thrift. Where I'm from, people from all social classes live more or less together, and it's impossible either to romanticize or demonize the poor, because you know them.

Now, the fact that someone is poor or otherwise disadvantaged doesn't mean they cease to be human, which is to say, prone to all sorts of folly. If somebody is acting like a fool, their race, class, or religion shouldn't protect them from the mockery of their fellow fools, like you and me. These kinds of polite pieties are a great obstacle to honest appraisal of social reality.

But there's something to be said for the unwritten rule of joke telling that says I can talk about my kind, but don't you dare. My friend Thomas, one of the best storytellers I know, is coming to visit this weekend, and we'll sit around drinking and telling hilarious stories of our friends and family back home in rural Louisiana. We're entitled to; these are our people. But woe betide any Yankee who tries that. I know it's illogical, but if you have to ask, "How come black people can say 'nigger' but white people can't?," you're obviously as dumb as a stump and deserve what you get if you try that in front of black folks. Same deal with the poor white-trash stories.

And there's something repulsive about telling these stories in a way that inspires nothing but contempt for an entire group of people who, whatever their sins, have a heavier cross to bear than most of us. That's why one wrinkle in this hateful tale of Hollywood crassness is particularly galling. One of the developers of this real-life Beverly Hillbillies is a documentary filmmaker named Dub Cornett, who lives in rural Virginia and calls himself an "Appalachian-American." He tells the Washington Post that he expects the joke to be on the snooty Beverly Hills folk, not the rednecks he hopes to recruit.

"If you look at the real 'Beverly Hillbillies,' Jed was the one guy you had any respect for, not the banker," Cornett told the Post.

"We will accomplish the most if we cast it well with people who respect themselves but see the humor in themselves. We will end up with a piece that truly has, God forbid, social commentary, and maybe will enlighten, that it's not all barefoot hillbillies," he said.

"Most of America can only imagine what it's like to live in Beverly Hills and live in a multimillion-dollar mansion. We can share this advantage with them, rather than laugh at them." But, he said, "If somebody is a stereotypical swing-from-the-trees hillbilly who shoots the lights out and parks cars in the front yard — hey, it happens. I live near that."

Yeah, and he's really hoping to find a noble savage to "enlighten" America. What a load of horse manure. It's true that literature has long made use of the fool to reveal the folly of the high and mighty, and that's what The Beverly Hillbillies did, to an extent. But that's fiction; those scenes can be manipulated by the artist for morally instructive effect. Nonfiction is not amenable to this kind of shading, and Cornett knows it.

No, his are the weasel words of a phony trying to talk himself into taking the money he's being offered to help hold up a desperate Appalachian family to national ridicule.

I defy anyone to watch some poor nobodies from the hills of West Virginia shuffling down Rodeo Drive in their overalls, to the mockery of all and sundry, and not feel ashamed. Even worse, underprivileged rural children will be part of the twisted game. Won't that be great, watching a little girl raised in the hookworm belt, peering in the windows at Fred Hayman and saying quaint dumb things about the purty clothes? One is reminded of Bruce Springsteen's mournful song, "Mansion on the Hill," a tale of working-class longing for a life of ease and pleasure denied them by fate and circumstance, but enjoyed by the privileged folks who live in the big house behind the steel gates. "In the summer all the lights would shine/There'd be music playin', people laughin' all the time/Me and my sister, we'd hide out in the tall corn fields/Sit and listen to the mansion on the hill."

Giving people, including children, who have nothing the opportunity to live in a mansion on the hill in exchange for their dignity: that's what the wealthy bicoastal elites who run CBS consider funny.

I think also of Rick Bragg's moving memoir, All Over But the Shoutin', in which the New York Times reporter tells of growing up poor in rural Alabama, the son of an alcoholic father and a hard-working mother, who cleaned rich people's commodes so her sons would have clothes on their backs. What kind of heartless Hollywood bastards would dangle the chance to live for a year in unimaginable luxury in front of people like the Bragg family, who sometimes barely had enough food to eat — and tell them they can have it all in exchange for their integrity?

The Real Beverly Hillbillies concept is revolting, and the no-class CBS Television division should catch hell for it (go here for the online comment box). It should be noted that when this program starts taping, America will probably be at war. It will not be sons of network executives fighting and dying for this country's liberty and security; it will be the sons of the farmers, the coal miners, and the factory workers, a disproportionate number of them — the white ones, at least — from low-income, southern homes. Young men from Appalachian hollers may die while CBS Television executives make money condescending to and insulting their people.

It is an outrage, but poor white folks are used to it. Nobody speaks up for them.

Ryn

Friday, October 11, 2002 - 05:17 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
ya know....

I dunno if this show will ever make it.. lol

check out this page full of articles...

http://www.shucks.net/shucks/hillbillies/default.htm

Twinkle

Saturday, October 12, 2002 - 09:22 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
Thanks for the multitude of articles, Ryn!
I remember way back at the pre-dawn of the age of Political Correctness, all ethnic jokes were becoming taboo. Rightly so. However, there was a surge of insulting Southern humor. I had moved to Alabama and was stunned and insulted by some of the stand-up comics who went for the LCD of insult humor. The National Review article expressed exactly what I used to feel: what would happen if instead of using "southerners" or "rednecks", the jokes referenced blacks, women, etc.? I adore good Southern humor that points out our quirks and foibles. However, the concept of the Real Beverly Hillbillies sounds like a return to an insulting, degrading and stereotypical protrayal of dumb Southern yayhoos.