"Green Acres is the place to be. Farm living is the life for me! Land spreadin' out so far and wide - keep Manhattan just give me that countryside!" - Eddie Albert as Oliver Douglas in the "Green Acres" Theme Song
Green Acres: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
As a child, Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert) wanted nothing more than to become a farmer. His blueblood father, however, insisted that young Oliver study to become a lawyer. Oliver reluctantly followed his father's advice, but even his life as a successful New York City attorney with a loving wife, Lisa (Eva Gabor), leaves him unfulfilled. He starts a "farm" on the balcony of his Park Avenue penthouse and grows mushrooms in the drawer of his desk, yet still dreams of owning a real farm. Lisa, a cultured city girl through and through, tolerates the balcony farm (she even donates a designer dress and mannequin for use as a scarecrow), but refuses to entertain the thought of leaving her beloved New York. After returning from a business trip one day, Oliver makes a stunning announcement - he has impulsively purchased a farm, Green Acres, near the tiny town of Hooterville.
Lisa reluctantly agrees to spend a six month trial period living on the farm which, as Oliver explains, is near Chicago (they must fly from New York to Chicago, then from there they only have to take two more planes, a bus AND a train). A horrified Lisa balks upon seeing the dilapidated farm that Oliver purchased from shady salesman Mr. Haney (Pat Buttram), but nevertheless attempts to make the best of a bad situation. Together they meet Hooterville's eccentric residents, including General Store owner Sam Drucker (Frank Cady), county agricultural agent Hank Kimball (Alvy Moore), fellow farmer Frank Ziffel (Hank Patterson), his wife Doris (Barbara Pepper), and their "son," Arnold, an intelligent pig. The Oliver and Lisa also hire goofball Eb Dawson (Tom Lester) to help work the farm.
Green Acres, which joined CBS's Wednesday night lineup on September 15, 1965, was part of the network's much derided mid- to late-1960s "rural" programming block. These shows, including The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Hee Haw, were reviled by critics but were immensely popular with audiences. These still-popular shows were famously cancelled by CBS in the early 1970s and replaced with series like All in the Family, M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show in an attempt to attract more sophisticated, urban audiences.
Although Green Acres is lumped in with the other rural shows (indeed, it is a spinoff of Petticoat Junction from the creator of The Beverly Hillbillies), Green Acres: The Complete First Season proves that the series is much more sophisticated than its detractors would have us believe. Its characters are simultaneously simple and complex. Oliver thinks that he is smart, yet he is constantly duped by the conniving Mr. Haney. He is even dumb enough to rent a hen! Oliver often speaks in the abstract about how friendly, helpful, and smart country folk are, but in practice, he looks down on his neighbors as uneducated boobs, dismissing the opinions of his more experienced fellow farmers. He expounds on his idyllic views of the peaceful nature of rural life while simultaneously remaining an unrepentant hothead. For all of his "back to nature" talk, Oliver also stubbornly insists on wearing a three piece business suit when doing farm work.
Lisa defers her wishes so that Oliver can follow his dream. While she would prefer to immediately return to New York, she is much more adaptable than her husband is. Although she is a miserable failure at cooking (her hotcakes more closely resemble sponges and her method of brewing four cups of coffee involves using four cups of ground coffee and four cups of water), she gamely tries to master this new task. Accustomed to the pampered life, her idea of clearing the table is to gather up the tablecloth by its four corners and throw the entire bundle out the kitchen window. While her husband speaks of moving to the farm as an attempt to connect with neighbors and form personal bonds, only Lisa seems willing actually to become a part of the Hooterville community. Oliver seldom capitulates to Lisa, but she even resorts to "planting" full grown carrots in his corn field to encourage her husband to stay on the farm that she hates.
The series at times employs surprisingly complicated storytelling techniques. The first episode, "Oliver Buys a Farm," is presented as a newsmagazine story, complete with an anchor/narrator and characters breaking the fourth wall. "Furniture, Furniture, Who's Got the Furniture" employs mistaken identity, miscommunication, and multi-layered, overlapping storylines in a way that would be refined by such future classics as Three's Company and Seinfeld. The first half of the season almost plays like a miniseries, adding layer after layer of the Douglas' adjustment to rural life - they attempt to hire a decorator, Lisa has second thoughts about living on the farm, they try to get the telephone and electrical service installed - giving the series a strong sense of forward motion. This sharp focus is lost somewhat in the later episodes which rely on gimmicks like clips from previous shows ("The Day of Decision") and Bewitched-esque supernatural highjinks ("The Ballad of Molly Turgiss"), but the show still maintains a sense of fun.
Mostly, though, the show is just plain funny. The "sophisticated" storytelling mentioned above rubs elbows with an extraordinarily communicative pig, after all. The never ending series undignified trials and tribulations that Oliver must go through in order to achieve his dream provide many of the laughs. The phone company finally installs a phone line, but they run out of wire shortly before reaching the house, so the Douglases must climb a phone pole to place or receive calls. A pole that, it should be noted, is planted right in front of their bedroom window, thus obliterating their view. Their furniture arrives from New York, but since their ramshackle new home is much smaller than their old apartment, the Douglases are forced to climb over the fainting couches, leopard print sofas, and coffee tables that now take up every square inch of space of the farmhouse. When Oliver subsequently decides to expand their bedroom, he hires the Monroe brothers, Alf and Ralph (Sid Melton and Mary Grace Canfield). Only, as it turns out, Ralph is actually a Monroe sister. They just thought a brother contracting team would be an easier sell. Lisa's farm exploits are also stupidly funny, as when she leaves a note for the hen requesting a specific number of eggs. (Oliver, of course, chastises her. When the hen actually lays the correct number of eggs, we are again left wondering which is the dumb one in this relationship).
Modern day sitcoms tend to have shorter running times than those from the 1960s, thus allowing networks to cram in more commercials. This has cut down on plot time, but it has also resulted in severely curtailed opening credit sequences and theme songs. Green Acres is a perfect example of how integral theme songs and title sequences can be. The lyrics to Vic Mizzy's theme perfectly encapsulate the show's concept, and the images that accompany them further help to delineate the main characters and their personalities. Mizzy's incidental music, with its odd mix of jug band, surf guitar, and gutbucket styles, is also an invaluable asset to the show. For a perfect example of how seemingly unimportant theme music has become, just try humming the theme song from Will & Grace.
With its depiction of Oliver Douglas constantly struggling against the irrational, unchangeable world around him, Green Acres is, in some ways, absurdist. It is hard to guess whether or not its creators set about to produce such a layered, complexly simple work, especially since they were also responsible for the barely one dimensional The Beverly Hillbillies. Sure, Green Acres is not Waiting for Godot, but it's also not easily dismissed.
The thirty-two episodes that make up Green Acres: The Complete First Season are divided onto two double-sided discs. The discs are housed in a foldout digipak case. A folder pocket of the case contains a booklet listing episode titles, airdates, and synopses. A photo from each episode is also included. The digipak slides into an outer cardboard sleeve. The design of the packaging is eye-catching and colorful.
The DVD menus are relatively simple. The main menu (featuring Arnold Ziffel and funky animation) leads to an episode selection menu. Viewers can then choose an episode using both episode numbers and synopses. There is no "play all" feature, and the episodes are not divided into chapters.
