Throughout the 1960s, Paul Henning was the creative mastermind behind three of the most successful sitcoms  then  on  television- The Beverly  Hillbillies (1962), Petticoat Junction (1963), and Green Acres (1965) -all of which shared narrative characteristics, and the first of which was perhaps the most successful network series on U.S. television. A perpetual Midwesterner who spent 30 years in Hollywood in both radio and television, Henning's basic country mouse/city mouse formula never veered far from his rural roots. Once those roots were deemed passed by the demo­ graphics avatars, his exile from television was both sudden and emphatic.

     When a radio spec script Henning had written on a whim was accepted by Fibber McGee and Molly, he began a 15-year career as a series staff writer, culminating with Burns and Allen on radio and then television, where he became a protege of future Tonight Show director Fred de Cordova. On TV Henning launched both The Bob Cummings Show (1955-59, all three networks), in which a pre-Dobie Gillis Dwayne Hickman assimilates the Southern California decadence of his starlet-addled bachelor uncle through a filter of Midwestern verities.

But he made both his name and fortune with The Beverly Hillbillies (1962-71, CBS). Equal parts John Steinbeck and absurdism, the nouveau-riche-out-of­ water Clampetts populated the top-rated program of their premier season, remained in the top ten throughout the rest of the decade, and had regular weekly episode ratings that rivaled those of Super Bowls.

     The Clampett clan initially hailed from an indeterminate backwoods locale somewhere along (in author David Marc's words) "the fertile crescent that stretches from Hooterville to Pixley and represents Henning's sit­ comic Yoknapatawpha." As explained in the opening montage and theme song, Lincolnesque patriarch Jed (Buddy Ebsen) inadvertently stumbles onto an oil for­ tune languishing just beneath his worthless tract of scrub oak and brambles and pursues his destiny westward to swank Beverly Hills, California, in the interest of finding suitable escorts for daughter Elly May (Donna Douglas) and employment prospects for wayward nephew Jethro (Max Baer, Jr.). In tow (in a sight gag from The Grapes of Wrath, no less) is Granny (Irene Ryan), carried out to the truck at the last second in her favorite rocker. In this way, the Clarnpetts inadvertently echoed the fascination of a rural population newly wired for television with the purveyors of TV's content-at least partially accounting for their own corresponding popularity.

     Meanwhile, Henning quickly moved to fashion several spin-offs with characters in common. Petticoat Junction (1963-70, CBS) featured long-time Henning player Bea Benaderet as Kate Bradley, proprietress of the Shady Grove Hotel, a homey inn situated along a railroad spur between Hooterville and Pixley, with her three growing daughters providing ample latitude for farmer's daughter jokes. The show was canceled in 1970 following Benaderet's death.

     Then, into this homespun idyll, Henning dropped Green Acres (1965-71, CBS), a flat-out assault on Cartesian logic, Newtonian physics, and Harvard­ centrist positivism. Lawyer Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert) and his socialite wife Lisa (Eva Gabor) come to Hooterville in search of the greening of Amer­ ica and a lofty Jeffersonian idealism. What they discover instead is a virtual parallel universe of unfettered surrealism, rife with gifted pigs, square chicken eggs, and biogenetic hotcakes-a universe that Lisa intuits immediately, but by which Oliver is constantly bewildered.

     In their later stages, these three worlds were increasingly interwoven, so that by the time of the holiday episodes where the arriviste Clampetts return to Hooterville to visit kith and kin, including the laconic Bradleys, and intersect with the proto-revisionist Douglases-using Sam Drucker's General Store as their narrative spindle-television had perhaps reached its self-reflexive pinnacle.

     Despite high ratings, both The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres were canceled in 1971 by CBS president James Aubrey in the same purge that claimed Mayberry RFD and shows starring Jackie Gleason and Red Skelton (which aired for a final season on NBC). The push to cultivate a consumer base of advertising­ friendly 18- to 34-year-olds was the same one that ushered in M*A*S*H, All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and, ostensibly, political conscience.

Yet, viewed in retrospect, the canceled shows per­haps perfectly mirrored the times. A pervasive argument against television has always been that its hermetic nature removes it from a social context: ide­alized heroes or families and their better-mousetrap worlds seem all but impervious to the greater ills of the day. Nowhere is this more evident or egregious (so the argument goes) than in I960s sitcoms, where a decade that was a watershed in politics and society elicited programming that seemed downright extraordinary in its mindlessness. But who better than garrulous nags, crusty aliens, maternal jalopies, suburban witches, subservient genies, gay Marines, or bungling Nazis to dramatize the trend in the social fabric, or typify the contradictions of the age? If so, no one was more adept at manipulating this conceit, nor pushed the envelope of casual surrealism further, than Henning.