The Beverly Hillbillies may have portrayed southerners as bumpkins, but remember...the main plots nearly always showed the Clampetts getting the best of the urbane sophisticates around them. I liked the show where Mr Drysdale thought that the Clampetts had an ongoing feud with a family called "the Greens", while Jed was talking about Collard Greens. "Yep," said Jed, "by the end of April we had Greens planted all over the property. You couldn't walk five feet without steppin' on one. Then the big rains came and washed all them greens out of the ground and down into the crick."

The Andy Griffith Show was great, I thought. Yeah, it was chock full of homespun American rural values, but it nearly always used good humor and hilarious characters to demonstrate them. It had a great cast of characters : Barney Phyfe was a classic of the self-important bumbler. Otis, Floyd, Gomer, Aunt Bee, Ernest T (whom I can thank for a persistent nickname in High School), and Opie were all well drawn and well acted.

Now if you want a real sickener of a sitcom, Lepus, how about Green Acres? Watching that show gave me a tangible feeling of wasting my time, and was nearly claustrophobia-inducing with its obnoxious characters, corny humor, and two-dimensional sets. Petticoat Junction was nearly as bad, except for old, cynical, cantankerous Uncle Joe who kept things relatively interesting.