Lots of Curves, You Bet!

Like the scenery around a moving train, Petticoat Junction seemed to change constantly...and so did our perceptions of it

Petticoat Junction, "Bobbie Jo and the Beatnik"
OB: January 7, 1964, 9 p.m. EST, CBS
This episode first aired a week before I was born.

Petticoat Junction, "My Daughter, the Doctor"
OB: January 14, 1964, 9 p.m. EST, CBS
I was born the day this episode first aired.

This review is part of the Summer of MeTV Classic TV Blogathon hosted by the Classic TV Blog Association. Click here  to check out this blogathon's complete schedule.


Definition of the word "Showrunner": "...the person responsible for all creative aspects of the show, and responsible only to the network (and production company, if it's not his production company). The boss. Usually a writer." --Alex Epstein, The Crafty TV and Screenwriting Blog.

That's a fairly new term to me. I first heard it used to describe J. J. Abrams' role behind the scenes of Lost, then David Chase' similar, earlier role on The Sopranos. Most of today's TV, including almost all dramatic television, is based on the idea of showrunner-as-auteur (The first two I mentioned, plus, say, Matthew Weiner of Mad Men, David Simon of The Wire and Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Joss Whedon).

Fact of the matter is, there have been executive producers who almost creatively fit the modern, 21st Century definition of "showrunner" as far back as the 1950s. You could argue the first showrunner was Desi Arnaz, though 1950s TV viewers didn't discuss, say, whether I Love Lucy fit his vision or was a big metajoke based on the most powerful woman in television pretending to be constantly kept from breaking into show business. Other, arguable "showrunners" of classic TV: Nat Hiken (The Phil Silvers Show, Car 54 Where Are You?), Sterling Silliphant (The Naked City, Route 66), Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone), Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek) and Norman Lear (All in the Family, Maude). All of these shows were the visions their executive producers wanted you to see. They clearly did more than make sure the studio space was rented and the car wrangler had procured enough vehicles. Even shows that had multiple showrunners over the years, like, say, The Virginian, had behind-the-scenes stories about how the show had to adapt to different visions as executive producers turned over, while struggling to keep the characters and premise familiar enough to viewers.

...which brings us, oddly enough, to Petticoat Junction and its executive producer and showrunner, Paul Henning.

Say what you will about Paul Henning and/or his work, but when you watched a Paul Henning series, you knew what you were going to get, how it would look, how it would feel, whether it would be funny and if so, why. And you could probably bet an entire week's salary you were going to see something politically incorrect. The "Paul Henning Trilogy" (as Joel Hodgson once ingeniously called it on Mystery Science Theater 3000) consisted of the culturally iconic class satire, The Beverly Hillbillies; that great underrated experiment in 1960s absurdist humor, Green Acres; and the show that more or less spun off Green Acres, the far less absurd Petticoat Junction.

A native of Missouri, Henning reportedly got personal advice from none other than future President Harry S Truman to be a lawyer. Instead Henning wanted to be a singer on the radio. When he got that job at a small radio station, he had to write a lot of his own material, which led to his writing for radio shows like Fibber McGee & Molly and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. Henning followed that last pair over to television, where he wrote much of their first two seasons and quite a few scripts for The Bob Cummings Show (or as it's been known since network daytime reruns, Love That Bob). When he wrote for Gracie Allen, Henning (and anyone else who wrote for her) invented a whole new universe of logic that made all the sense in the world to Gracie but none to, say, George, or Gracie's next door neighbor Blanche (Bea Benaderet). And on the more politically incorrect Bob Cummings Show, we get a glimpse of how Henning often treated women on his later shows.

I've written before about how CBS in the early 1960s was such a schizophrenic network--with the quality sought out by, and prided by, chairman Bill Paley (The Twilight Zone, The Dick Van Dyke Show) colliding with the lowest-common-denominator material approved by network president Jim Aubrey (The Beverly Hillbillies). And sometimes there was even a show that had something for both--Route 66, for instance, had high-quality scripts and production values that appealed to Paley, and the hunky guys, fist fights and beautiful girls that made Aubrey's world turn 'round. Henning was clearly on Team Aubrey, so much so that their cozy relationship would be part of Aubrey's undoing and ouster at the network (Henning actually paid for a condo for Aubrey, for instance, running afoul of the network's conflict-of-interest policies).

The Beverly Hillbillies had mostly been critically reviled (though TV Guide's Cleveland Amory came around...a little) but a runaway freight train of a hit for CBS, topping the Neilsens for two seasons in a row. So Aubrey certainly had Henning's ear for a new series for the 1963-64 season. Henning came up with one based on stories told by his wife, Ruth, about a hotel in Eldon, Missouri, located near the Rock Island Railroad, that she often visited with her cousins. This was shaped into what would be called at various times, Ozark Widow, Whistle Stop and Dern Tootin', before it got the title we all know, Petticoat Junction.
My knowledge of the show is a perfect example of how our perspectives of the show evolved so much over the years. When I was a toddler and a pre-K boob tube worshiper, and new episodes were still being brought to us on CBS by the makers of Tide detergent and Ivory Soap, I'm pretty sure I loved the show for its train, and because Uncle Joe reminded me of a fat Mr. Green Jeans from Captain Kangaroo. It was when I rediscovered the syndicated reruns during puberty that I started paying more attention to Bobbie Jo, Billie Jo and Betty Jo.

But as a full-fledged adult, looking back now, Jim Aubrey's influence couldn't be more obvious. The show had a big T&A factor, with pretty girls and (as critics still bemoan when a new season is released on DVD) lots of sexual repression. The opening credits, theme song and even title is arguably loaded with Freudian imagery, right down to the train and the girls bathing (naked!) in the railroad's water tower, as a leering male vocalist sings "Lots of curves, you bet/and even more when you get/to the Junction."
But years later, as it pops up in reruns on MeTV, it seems more innocent, more wistful and nostalgic, like the more grounded older sibling of its 1965 spinoff, Green Acres, its more sedate, dry humor being perhaps a ying to the wilder, more colorful yang of Acres. Many people seem to understand it was a different era. The show, and the time in which it was filmed, never changed, but television and the rest of us did.

Henning brought his longtime associate, Bea Benaderet from the Burns & Allen days, over from her role as Cousin Pearl on The Beverly Hillbillies to headline the show as Kate Bradley, the widowed mother of teenagers Bobby Jo, Billie Jo and Betty Jo. She ran the historic Shady Rest Hotel, originally built to be accessible only by railroad, and was still so in the 1960s. Kate's Uncle Joe, the girls' great uncle, managed to have the jobs of hotel handyman and volunteer fire chief and do as little as possible at either one, which is why Kate is seen having to wake him up in the opening credits.
It all takes place near and around (specifically, a short ways up the track from) Hooterville, a small whistlestop town and bedroom community to the apparently larger Pixley in an unknown state. Unlike Mayberry of The Andy Griffith Show, which had a vibrant town square that was at once accessible and still busy, Hooterville was more of a "wide place in the road," more like many of the rural, unincorporated communities I often drive through here in Alabama that don't have mayors or city councils but actually have volunteer fire departments and even their own post offices and zip codes.
Benaderet had been a veteran of old time radio, appearing in everything from Amos 'n' Andy to Fibber McGee & Molly, but best remembered for her work with Jack Benny, Burns & Allen and (in My Favorite Husband) with Lucille Ball. In fact, Ball wanted her to play Ethel on I Love Lucy, but Benaderet was already under contract with The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, which by then had left radio for TV. Bea also worked for years in Warner Brothers cartoons, most notably as the sweet granny who owns Tweety Bird. When she began Petticoat Junction she was actually wrapping up one final season of voicework, this time as Betty Rubble on The Flintstones.
She is joined on Petticoat Junction by veteran character actor Edgar Buchanan as Uncle Joe. Buchanan was a veteran of numerous movies (sharing the soundstage with John Wayne and Doris Day) and numerous TV shows (from Gunsmoke to two memorable episodes of Leave It to Beaver). Henning invoked the nepotism clause for the part of the tomboyish Betty Jo; she's played by his own daughter, Linda Kaye Henning, who was said to be the inspiration for the tomboyish animal lover Elly May Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies. Betty Jo (and even Kate) occasionally even ran the train, the antique 1800s era Cannonball, that had become disconnected from the main railroad and began to function as more or less a hotel shuttle and a forerunner of rural public transportation.

Linda Kaye Henning was a regular for the run of the show, but the other two Bradley daughters had some turnover. Jeannine Riley was the original Billie Jo, with Pat Woodell as Bobbie Jo. They would both depart in 1965--just as the show was switching over to color--with Lori Saunders taking over as Bobbie Joe. Future Hee Haw honey Gunilla Hutton would play Billie Jo for one season before the role was taken over in 1966 by the beloved Meredith MacRae, daughter of actors Gordon and Sheila MacRae and a former My Three Sons regular. In fact, that classic version of the show so many people remember--in color, with Benaderet, Saunders and MacRae all together at the same time--only existed for two seasons (1966-68) before Benaderet's losing battle with lung cancer and, tragically, her death, removed her from the show. Former Lassie and Lost in Space mother June Lockhart filled her void as the Hooterville doctor during the series' last season and a half.

I was born halfway through the series' debut season, the one that saw it race up the Neilsen tracks to end the season as the fourth most popular show on television. It was a season that set the stage for the rest of the series and explained so much of the show's origins, while tinkering with a format as it struggled to avoid becoming a one plot show. ("Remember that Petticoat Junction episode where the stranger came to town?")

Before I look at the show that aired the night I was born, a word about the role of music on this show. Of Paul Henning's so-called "trilogy," this is the one that featured the most musical numbers. Sometimes it fit--people gathering in the parlor while someone sang and someone played the piano is fairly common in real life, and just seems natural--and sometimes it looks like a goofy musical number (which, in this post-Buffy, post-Scrubs, age of Glee, might even be more readily acceptable now, despite all the cheesiness). Music would become especially important in the later years as MacRae and actor Mike Minor (Steve Elliott, eventually the husband of Betty Jo and father of Kathy Jo) were trained singers and their voices were featured prominently. In later years it wasn't unsual to hear, say, MacRae sing a Dionne Warwick song, or even Minor croon the Beatles' "When I'm 64." Plus as Carl Reiner once let slip about The Dick Van Dyke Show, the more music there was in a half-hour comedy, the less work the writers had to do...so the writers loved it.

"Step to the right, to the left, then the hop, with your partner," "That's the Hooterville Hop!" we hear at the beginning of "My Daughter, the Doctor." We see Bobby Joe and Betty Jo dancing with one of their male friends, to a dance craze that appears to be exclusive to the Hooterville valley. At a time when American pop music was transforming from Bobby Vinton and Frankie Valli to the Beatles and Motown, a variation of the early 1950s "Bunny Hop" which uses the tune of the show's theme song is enough to capture the imagination of Hooterville's young people, reinforcing the "alternate society" of its escapist premise.

Kate enters with an important letter for Billie Jo and is brought into the "Hop," which the girls say their friend Paul invented and which everyone is learning for the big school dance. She's told Billie Jo is practicing archery with a couple more male friends.

Kate has news: she informs the two girls their sister is going to be a doctor, which leaves the two gobsmacked. "Hooterville's Tuesday Weld?" says Bobbie Jo. "Miss Built Best from the Shady Rest?" pipes up Betty Jo.

What happens next is a rare area where Petticoat Junction actually one-ups The Andy Griffith Show. On Griffith we almost never heard back stories, just occasional snippets about, say, the time Andy froze in a high school biology class, or differing years as to when Barney began working as a deputy. We never heard details about, say, Andy's own parents or what exactly happened to Opie's mother. But here is where we get the complete back story on the girls and the fact they actually had a father.

The day before Billie Jo, the oldest, was born, her father William, "Rest his soul" as Kate says, took out an endowment policy "to send his son to medical school." He was so convinced his first child was going to be a boy he has his name and career all picked out, Dr. William Bradley Jr. When Betty Jo asks if he was disappointed, Kate says, "Not when he saw her. Then he was the proudest father in the whole valley." Then the same thing happened all over again when Kate was expecting Bobbie Jo, but then it was "Dr. Robert Bradley." "And then I had to go and let him down again," says Bobbie Jo, with Betty Jo adding, "He must've really flipped when I came along."

Kate says "Your father loved all of you with all his heart. Why, he wouldn't have traded you three girls for the Mayo brothers." But apparently female doctors were a "last resort" in those days. Still, when "Bill, your father, saw that he had an all-girl family, he went back to his original plan to send his first child to medical school." He even introduced her as "my daughter, the doctor" when she was a child.

That's when Billie Jo and her male friends arrive, Billie Jo being touted as a "natural for archery." Billie Jo proudly, but cluelessly, brags about how she was told she "almost has perfect form already," a double entendre that gets an eyeroll from Kate and a chuckle from the laugh track. (There's an uncomfortable amount of dialogue about the girls' bodies.)

"Five hundred dollars?!" an excited and wide-eyed Billie Jo exclaims when she sees the check."Mom, that means I can do what I've been planning and dreaming about for so long, I can go to Hollywood!" The
"Hooterville Hop" suddenly resumes without anyone turning on a record player, but Kate takes Billie Jo into the kitchen to tell her, even though her father would never want her to do anything against her will, "It was his last wish, so give it a lot of consideration." What Billie Jo really wants to do, however, is go to Hollywood and make movies with Rock Hudson (and when Riley left the show in 1965, it was actually to pursue a movie career). Kate tries to reason that thousands of girls go to Hollywood for that very reason every year, and most either come home brokenhearted or worse yet, stay there brokenhearted. But Billie Jo is insisting she'll be rich enough to take care of the whole family.

Uncle Joe comes in and puts in his two cents. "Why Billie Jo, Hollywood is no place for a young, innocent girl like you...why, those wolves would be at you the minute you got there!" His answer: he'll go to Hollywood with her and be her manager. (Uncle Joe's hobby was apparently to collect positions of responsibility and be lazy at them.)

Kate's reaction to this is to try to bring Dr. Pugh over to talk to Billie Jo. She finds a train car full of women who also, suddenly, want to see the doctor. Floyd the train conductor (played by Rufe Davis, who had previously been a character actor in B-westerns) tells her Dr. Pugh has a new, handsome assistant, Dr. Harris. "I hear he doesn't even have to tell the women to say 'ah,' they say it the minute they see him," says Floyd.

After a trip to the Hooterville station (and a commercial break), she calls Dr. Pugh on a pay phone to ask about the assistant. "Yes, I know he's too young for me," says Kate, who explains she wants Dr. Harris to visit the Shady Rest to convince Billie Jo to go to medical school. The guise is to pretend it's an emergency, and she says it'll involve Uncle Joe so she won't really be lying.

After the train is turned around for the trip back, we see the doctor, played by none other than a pre-Batman Adam West. The train pulls out on Kate's signal leaving a bunch of disappointed women at the station.

As the most famous train in television history brings Dr. Harris and Kate back to the Shady Rest, we find everyone--all three daughters, male friends, even Uncle Joe--doing the Hooterville Hop in the lobby. until Uncle Joe says he needs some "high protein energy building food" and heads to the kitchen for some pie. With Dr. Harris held up on the train, Kate interrupts the hop party to tell everyone to pretend Uncle Joe is sick and look worried, and tells Billie Jo to "look beautiful and worried." (Yes, I cringed too.) Kate catches Uncle Joe in the kitchen eating pie, and gets him to "audition" to test his own acting skills, in case Billie Jo doesn't make it in Hollywood and he has to act. He's to pretend to be sick, and he'll get an entire pie in bed.

Uncle Joe tells about the dizzy spells and says he didn't notice them because of the stabbing pain in his arm and his bad back. "I'm just one big mass of misery," says Uncle Joe. What unfolds is one of those sitcom scenes where a lie is so fragile and always on the verge of falling apart; when the doc asks how long Uncle Joe had the symptoms, Kate says "a week" and Joe says "a month" simultaneously, leading Kate to say "A month and a week." When she leaves, Joe tells her to get that pie ready. Dr. Harris says, "I don't believe we should be eating any pie," to which Joe responds, "I wasn't planning on sharing any with you, doc!"

Downstairs, Billie Jo has left for the lake with Junior, and everyone else--even Floyd the conductor and Charley the engineer (Smiley Burnett, another actor from 1930s B-movies and a frequent performer with Gene Autry)--are still doing the Hooterville Hop. Kate sends Charley to get Billie Jo, preferably without Junior, and joins in the hop. Dr. Harris sees this and assumes they're not too worried about Uncle Joe, so he starts to leave. That's when they try to sell him on the idea that the hop is actually a disease that affects the foot muscles.

After a commercial break, Kate is still desperately trying to keep Dr. Harris at the hotel until Billie Jo gets back. That includes checking Betty Jo for some poison ivy she suffered earlier.

Dr. Harris: I'm afraid I'm too late, Mrs. Bradley.
Kate: You mean it's serious?
Dr. Harris: It's gone.
Kate: What about the other leg?
Dr. Harris: It's very lovely, they make a nice pair.

So then Kate suddenly complains about her foot (the whole "Hooterville Hop is a contagious disease" bit seemed to resolve itself during the commercial). While he's looking at the foot and a made up eye problem, Billie Jo finally arrives, so Kate sends them upstairs so she can see Dr. Harris run some tests on Uncle Joe.

Dr. Harris takes Uncle Joe's blood pressure, finding it highly elevated (and Uncle Joe melodramatically asking to make out his will). Then he takes blood from Uncle Joe, with Billie Joe cleaning his finger with alcohol. An excited Kate goes to get her sisters, as Dr. Harris takes the blood. When he turns to Billie Jo, she's lying on the floor, having fainted at the first sight of blood. And that ends the medical career of Billie Jo Bradley.

The episode ends with everyone, including the doctor, doing the Hooterville Hop (he's now paired off with Billlie Jo), while Uncle Joe, now having convinced himself he's at death's door, worries down a lemon meringue pie. This was actually the start of a three-episode story arc about Billie Jo's determined dream to go to Hollywood. But ultimately, Billie Jo learns that life in Hooterville isn't so bad after all and ends up living in the area for another six years at least, because what more could she ask? (Later on, the version of Billie Jo played by Meredith MacRae tried very hard for a singing career and actually had more success.)

The rural setting around Hooterville was supposed to represent a peaceful status quo. Outsiders often brought in temptations or their own troubles; in the first episode we meet the show's one-note (but still hilarious) villain, Homer Bedloe, the railroad company president bound and determined to shut down the Cannonball and by extension, the Shady Rest Hotel. And as "The Hooterville Hop" joined the Twist and other famous dances that burned out quickly, Beatlemania finally swept the Hooterville Valley. All three daughters, with The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis' Sheila James rounding out the quartet, formed their own group, the Ladybugs. They even performed that way in a real-world appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

The week before I was born, the episode "Bobbie Jo and the Beatnik" shook up the Hooterville status quo in a surprisingly edgy way, with a surprisingly edgy actor: a young Dennis Hopper. All of this, of course, was done in the name of defending the status quo.

As we meet Alan Landman (Hopper) in the very first scene, he's already picking apart Bobbie Jo's whole way of life. They've walked up from Hooterville along the tracks, her hanging on his every word, and her simple invitation for dinner and a warm bath at the hotel is met with his complaining about people who say "How do you do?" and don't care.He says if someone asked about her day at school and she said "Lousy," they say "Fine, let's eat!" "You're a dove, I'm an eagle, I'm screaming at life, eager to tear it wide open!"

Ultimately, the first impressions all around are not great. He pretty much lets a flirty Billie Jo know she's an airhead, while she says he's in love...with himself. When he tries to describe his poetry to Uncle Joe, whose idea of poetry is a limerick, Alan says, "My poetry is a cry of anguish in the tortured night." "Oh, you write jingles for them indigestion commercials!" (This particular episode has a lot of sharp, funny dialogue.)

After dinner, Kate decides to host a poetry discussion, with Charley, Uncle Joe and Floyd joining along with Bobbie Jo and Alan. We get a feeling of how things are going to go when Kate starts off reciting from memory, the passage, "Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough, a flask of wine and thou singing in the wilderness," from "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam."

Charley: Ain't that kind of risque for mixed company?
Floyd: I don't think so, they were just singing and drinking a little wine.
Charley: But they're out in the wilderness!
Uncle Joe: True, but they could be married, it don't say.
Charley: A man don't go out in the woods with his wife!
Uncle Joe: Yeah, but he was drinking wine, don't forget!

Kate asks if anyone else has poetry, prompting Uncle Joe to come up with...

"I've never seen a purple cow,
I never hope to see one.
But I can tell you anyhow,
I'd rather see than be one!" then laughs at himself. He's the only one, prompting him to say, "Come to think of it, it ain't so funny!"

Alan, by contrast, saying "I don't know if I'm far enough out for you cats or not!" reads his latest poem.

"A gaunt, thin winding wind,
Defiles the groaning bones of neon-blinded seekers,
After murky morning,
The burning mud explodes
A screaming pathway,
Through hollow thunder of agony.
I fall! I fall! And cheated dreams
A toenail splits!" then he snaps his fingers.

After Uncle Joe grouses "I'd like to know what it means, if anything," Alan gets back up and says, "It means, that this is a cemetery, and you're all corpses. Good night!" He walks out and Bobbie Jo  goes after him. We actually see her take a draw on his cigarette and choke a bit.  When she says she wishes she could express herself the way he does, Kate eavesdrops as he tells her, "You'll never do it around here, baby!" and they leave for a walk.

Kate and Alan later have a private, to the point chat. He says he plans to send for Bobbie Jo when he gets to New Orleans, hanging out with musician friends. "So you plan to live your life as a parasite? That means sponge," says the cognitively dissonant Kate, whose Uncle Joe is one of the laziest characters in television history. Alan tells Kate her "old fashioned ideas about working hard and living clean" are "all a bunch of junk," and he'll be taking off in the morning. Kate is very concerned, that even if he leaves and Bobbie Jo never hears from him again, she'll always remember him as a courageous, romantic rebel. Kate tells Uncle Joe the worst thing she can do is have a talk with Bobbie Jo, then fails to take her own advice and tells Bobbie Jo about how he just lives off other people because he doesn't want to fight for a job.

The next morning, as Alan gets ready to hit the road, a Mr. Stanley in the dog food business checks into the Shady Rest. Mr. Stanley complains about how he's offered a $2,000 bonus to anyone in his ad agency who can come up with a good radio and television jingle for his company and no one can come up with one. Alan seems interested in the money...sure enough, we hear him following Stanley around, spouting off lines like "Rollo Dog Food is never gummy, can't form a ball in your puppy's tummy, Rollo Dog Food is doggone yummy!" "Speaking from the dog's viewpoint, it doesn't make my tail wag!" says the dog food CEO.

Bobbie Jo overhears his, considering the money might give him the money to write real poetry, since he has real talent. Just in time for that, Alan can be heard saying "Give your dog some Rollo now, makes him say 'Bow wow wow!'" Stanley says he wants someone who thinks like a dog, and admits he himself wants to chase cats into trees. That prompts Alan to confess he likes to chase cars and bite at the tires.

The two form a partnership, sealed with the two barking at each other as Bobbie Jo looks on in horror. (It's a funny enough scene made funnier by the sight of Dennis Hopper barking like a dog.) The beat poet has just sold out and transformed into a mad man. And it turns out the dog food CEO is actually a restaurant supply salesman posing on Kate's behalf. (The episode ending is rather ironic as it seems to predict how the edgy Hopper, who would later make groundbreaking films like "Easy Rider" and "Blue Velvet," would end up late in life doing commercials for retirement planning.)

The show evolved almost constantly, unusually so for a sitcom that prided itself on living in its own world, where life supposedly never changes. Although the girls are supposed to be teenagers at first, we never see them graduate or anything, one day they're suddenly women. One surprisingly big change in season two, is when the Bradleys adopt their nameless stray dog, played by trainer Frank Inn's star dog, Higgins. One of the most memorable movies of my childhood, "Benji," starred Higgins in the title role, with Uncle Joe himself, Edgar Buchanan, in a small role as a butcher who feeds him scraps.

As the series progresses, Betty Jo marries Steve Elliott, the crop duster whose plane has a "hard landing" near the hotel, and the tomboy becomes a woman whose whole world is apparently her home and especially her kitchen. There's even a production number, set to the Glen Campbell song, "Dreams of an Everyday Housewife," that celebrates it. When Kate abruptly leaves down for reasons never fully explained (the death of Bea Benaderet making it necessary), the girls are forced to grow up. Billie Jo, in the capable hands of Meredith MacRae, becomes the "smart one," while Bobbie Joe devolves into a ditz. And despite Kate's failed January 14, 1964 experiment with Billie Jo, there is a doctor living at the Shady Rest--Dr. Craig, played by June Lockhart, who treats the three sisters more as equals than as surrogate daughters.

The show's ratings plummeted after the death of Bea Benaderet, and although some fans claim the ratings were just starting to pick up midway through the 1969-70 television season, CBS cancelled Petticoat Junction. The cast were able to reappear months later for a final bow, as they and the cast of Green Acres made a multi-episode Thanksgiving-themed crossover appearance on The Beverly Hillbillies. Months later, the other two shows would themselves be on the cancellation block, part of the big CBS rural purge of 1971 (when "they cancelled everything with a tree in it").

Today, it's considered the lesser of the "Paul Henning Trilogy," and surprisingly it's the most polarizing. Some classic TV fans simply think it's dull; some are fans who are able to get past the sexism of the 1960s, to enjoy the chemistry of the actors and the episodes that can sometimes be rather funny. (When Green Acres was spun off and some of that series' regulars made crossover appearances, the writing especially picked up; Uncle Joe's scheme with the doorknobs, for instance, itself looks more like a Green Acres episode.)

But in the case of Petticoat Junction, getting past the sexism was quite a trip, as there's more of it here than most other shows of the period. And this being the least zany of the Henning trio perhaps implies it's to be taken slightly more seriously. It's almost as if the show's central theme is the eternal search for a husband to make everything right. Even now, one reviewer of a Petticoat Junction DVD set blasted the show for the way the girls displayed their sexuality but made it clear it was all repressed, and the setting--with a rail line cut off from the main line--a "celebration of xenophobia," an ideal world all to itself (as opposed to the more welcoming atmosphere of Mayberry). (To be fair, that might be a rather strong and unfair criticism, as there's no evidence the characters are actually prejudiced, just isolationist.) At least one message board poster said she couldn't bear to watch some of the more sexist early episodes, like the one in which Kate tells Betty Jo to take a dive in a horseshoe tournament to save a man's pride.

In the end, Petticoat Junction really seemed to want to celebrate women in general--after all, the main character was a woman running a hotel--but with its staff of male writers, didn't quite know how to do it in the 1960s. It says a lot that the characters changed--but not necessarily evolved--over the years, being independent, then not so much, in fits and starts.

But perhaps it speaks volumes that, when the final season's summer reruns played out and the show finally left CBS in September 1970--the show that premiered in its time slot the following week featured a radically different portrayal of women: The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Availability: the show's first three seasons are available on DVD. A number of later shows are on Youtube, and of course, the show is rerun on MeTV.

Next time on this channel: The Patty Duke Show.


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