Every Version of The Beverly Hillbillies

Nine seasons is a long run, and not every episode holds up equally, but the first three or four seasons of the original CBS series are genuinely funny television. Buddy Ebsen as Jed Clampett is a performance of quiet authority, almost never going for the obvious joke, and Irene Ryan as Granny is one of the great comic characterizations of 1960s network TV. The show works because Jed is never stupid: he is wise, composed, and usually right. The fish-out-of-water premise survives nine seasons because the show had the sense to make the fish formidable.

The 1993 theatrical remake directed by Penelope Spheeris has a capable cast (Jim Varney as Jed, Lily Tomlin as Miss Hathaway), and Spheeris had just come off Wayne's World. The film is not unwatchable. But it plays the Clampetts as broader and dumber than Henning ever wrote them, and leans on a tired identity-theft subplot when the original premise is already a perfectly good engine for comedy. It earned decent box office but satisfied almost nobody who cared about the source material.

In 2003, CBS development briefly advanced a concept called The Real Beverly Hillbillies, which would have moved an actual rural family into a Beverly Hills mansion and filmed the results as an unscripted series. The project was cancelled following protests from rural advocacy groups and critics who argued it would mock Appalachian culture for entertainment. It never aired. What makes it worth noting is the tension it exposes: is the joke on the hillbillies, or on Beverly Hills? Henning's scripted version always had a clear answer. The reality format would have removed that authorial control entirely, and almost certainly have landed on the wrong side.