Inside the ‘Rural Purge’ of the ’70s: When CBS Turned Its Back on ‘Andy Griffith,’ Hooterville and Americana TV (EXCLUSIVE)

It’s hard to imagine today, but in the early 1970s, CBS launched one of the most dramatic shakeups in television history. Practically overnight, the network canceled a slate of hit programs—shows that still ranked among the most popular in the ratings—because executives decided they no longer fit the image they wanted to project. Beloved comedies like The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Mayberry R.F.D. (a successful spin-off of The Andy Griffith Show) were swept away in what came to be called “the Rural Purge.” The decision didn’t just end familiar programs; it marked a dramatic shift in how television executives viewed their audience and what kind of America they wanted reflected on screen.

Few people have examined that moment in television history more closely than Sara K. Eskridge, author of Rube Tube: Rural Comedy in the Sixties, a book that digs into the rise and fall of rural programming on CBS. For Eskridge, more than an exploration of TV history, it was a deeper look at southern identity, stereotypes and the complicated ways popular culture shapes public perception.

“I’ve always been really fascinated as a southerner in the concept of southern stereotypes and the ideas that people have about southerners, whether they’ve actually met Southern people or been to the South,” Eskridge explained in an exclusive interview. “There seem to be certain stereotypes that proliferate throughout the country about who we are and what we do and how we behave. Of course, they don’t start with rural comedy, but there are vestiges of a lot of those stereotypes within those shows. I was really interested in exploring that to see what stereotypes they upheld, what ideas they created that were new and how they evolved.”

TV discoveries

Interestingly, Eskridge didn’t grow up watching The Beverly Hillbillies or Petticoat Junction. “I was actually born quite a bit after these shows were on the air and I did not grow up with them. The first time I watched them was when I started doing this research. These were things I had heard references to my entire life—I certainly knew they existed—but my parents didn’t watch them and they weren’t a part of my childhood. What surprised me was how often they came up in graduate school readings, so I wanted to dig into them more.”

That fresh perspective gave Eskridge a different kind of lens than someone who grew up laughing at the Clampetts or Hooterville residents every week. Instead of approaching the material through nostalgia, she was studying it for what it revealed about American culture.

More than just ‘country bumpkins’

What Eskridge found surprised her. “Honestly, I expected to be disgusted by them, to think they were really stereotypical,” she admitted. “But I had a mixed reaction. Some shows, like Green Acres, definitely leaned into stereotypes, but I also found them incredibly enjoyable. The creators really did try to focus on character building. In a lot of ways, they were somewhat subversive. These characters often had their own wisdom.”

She points to The Beverly Hillbillies as a prime example. The Clampetts might have been portrayed as backwoods outsiders in Beverly Hills, but Eskridge notes they often came across as the sensible ones.

“They legitimately had no idea what the use was for things we take for granted as part of modern life. They didn’t understand why you’d have a swimming pool—to them it was a habitat for animals. Why would you build a cement pond in your backyard when you could swim anywhere? They didn’t need a stove because you could cook on a fire. They didn’t see why neighbors wouldn’t appreciate roadkill left on their doorstep. They were living by old-fashioned values that didn’t make sense in the modern world, and yet they seemed convinced that it was everyone else who was crazy.”

Being true to yourself

Part of what made the Clampetts so appealing, Eskridge suggests, is that they never lost sight of who they were. “They weren’t swayed by the modern environment. Jed Clampett wanted to make a better life for his family, but they remained true to themselves. They would interact with modernity, even experiment with it, but at the core, they stayed who they were. There’s something impressive about that unwillingness to waver.”

This approach extended to other shows as well. Even in broadly comic characters like Gomer Pyle, there was more going on than a simple caricature. “Andy Griffith discovered Jim Nabors in a nightclub act, where he was doing a bit that combined a southern persona with operatic singing. Griffith saw something of himself in that, because before fame, he had done southern ‘yokel’ versions of Shakespeare. Nabors was doing the same kind of juxtaposition, performing operatic arias in this southern voice. It was a kind of subversion. They took what could have been a stereotype and fleshed it out so there was more depth.”

That foundation of rural shows that could be both stereotypical and surprisingly layered set the stage for understanding why CBS embraced them so enthusiastically and why, just a few years later, the network decided to cut them down.

The arrival of Fred Silverman

When CBS programming chief Fred Silverman took over in the late 1960s, he brought with him a new way of looking at television. Instead of simply trusting ratings, he analyzed the demographics behind them, which was a relatively fresh approach at the time.

As Sara Eskridge explains, “He was looking at the data, which was not really something that had been done to any real extent before this. He realizes only old people watch those shows. They’d been on the air for more than 10 years, starting to lose favor with the younger crowd, so he cancels them. He wanted something new for the boomer audience.”

On paper, that sounds logical. But Silverman’s decisions went further than the numbers. In fact, Eskridge found that his distaste for rural comedies was deeply personal.

“Fred Silverman had a real dislike of anything rural. He called these shows ‘sh**-kicking shows.’ I even went back and read his master’s thesis, which he wrote in the fifties. Even then, he expressed a complete distaste for these kinds of shows and disdain for the people who watched them. So it went both ways.”

That prejudice created a bizarre contradiction. While the so-called “rural shows” were still ratings winners, Silverman pulled the plug anyway.

“These are shows that were in the top 10, most of them in the top 20 when they were canceled,” Eskridge points out. “He ignored the data and said, ‘I don’t want the people who are watching this to be affecting our programming.’ He classed them as a lower class of viewers.”

In other words, it wasn’t just about making way for new hits. Silverman was trying to reshape CBS’ brand, even if it meant discarding loyal audiences.

Silverman’s relationship with variety programming highlighted his contradictions even more. He championed The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the late 1960s, a show that began as wholesome entertainment for teenagers but grew increasingly political. The Smothers Brothers skewered the Nixon administration, questioned the Vietnam War and pushed boundaries that made CBS nervous.

“Fred Silverman wanted relevance, but too much relevance was bad,” Eskridge says. “The Smothers Brothers kept insisting on putting political content on the air and they ended up getting fired despite having been renewed for a fourth season.”

The replacement? A little cornball variety hour called Hee Haw. “It’s ironic,” Eskridge laughs. “He hated southern rural programming right up until the point when it benefited him. He took the Smothers Brothers off the air and one month later replaced them with Hee Haw.”

The irony deepened when Hee Haw itself was soon canceled as part of the purge—only to thrive in syndication for two decades.

Eskridge sees these decisions as proof of how much television programming can be shaped by the biases of a few powerful individuals. “It’s amazing how his personal prejudice kind of got in the way of making money,” she says. “Granted, he was right in one sense. Boomers were growing up and wanted something more sophisticated, like Mary Tyler Moore or All in the Family. But it shows how personal agendas can impact what an entire nation is watching.”

She also points out that the same dynamic hasn’t entirely disappeared. “What has changed? Why would it not be that way? You still have people at the heads of studios making those decisions. What they say goes, regardless of what the data bears out. Today, you might have to justify yourself more to the board, but the principle hasn’t changed.”

Out with the old, in with the new

The rural shows axed by Silverman were The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–1971), Green Acres (1965–1971), Mayberry R.F.D. (1968–1971), Petticoat Junction (1963–1970), Hee Haw (1969–1971, CBS run), The Jim Nabors Hour (1969–1971), and The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour (1969–1972). Ushered in were a number of more adult comedies, best epitomized by the network’s 1973 Saturday night lineup, which remains one of the strongest in television history: All in the Family (1971–1979), M*A*S*H (1972–1983), The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977), The Bob Newhart Show (1972–1978) and The Carol Burnett Show (1967–1978).

So what did audiences think when their favorite shows were suddenly axed? “It was a mixed bag,” Eskridge says. “For people in that targeted boomer demographic, I don’t think they necessarily cared. There was probably nostalgia, like ‘Oh, that’s a piece of my childhood disappearing.’ But those same boomers also thought, ‘Now there’s something for us.’ They weren’t watching TV anymore because nothing appealed to them. A show like All in the Family, in theory, brought them back.”

Of course, All in the Family brought its own controversies, like raising questions about whether Archie Bunker was a satirical anti-hero or a lovable hero embodying old prejudices. But it fit Silverman’s goal of chasing younger, urban viewers.

The Rural Purge wasn’t just about taste. It was also about branding, politics and power. To understand how CBS got to the point where it both relied on and then rejected rural programming, you have to look at the network’s history in the 1950s and 1960s, when it swung from being accused of communist sympathies to embracing country comedies as its salvation.

From the “Communist Broadcast System” to the “Country Broadcast System”

CBS didn’t set out to become the home of cornpone humor. In fact, in the years before the rural comedy boom, the network had been under a cloud of suspicion. During the height of the Red Scare in the 1950s, CBS was branded by critics—including FBI director J. Edgar Hoover—as the “Communist Broadcast System.”

As Sara Eskridge discovered, that label stemmed from the network’s associations with entertainers and creators who had been blacklisted. “CBS, more than any other network, had been associated with people on various blacklists, accused of communist activities. They were constantly facing charges of being sympathizers,” she explains. “They kept trying to adapt, but it kept going badly for them.”

The network’s attempts to rebrand itself in the late 1950s and early 1960s often backfired. “They picked up the Western boom, which was great until parents started complaining about violence,” Eskridge says. “Then CBS executives had to go before Congress and testify, trying to explain how a kid who watched Bronco didn’t necessarily end up serving time in prison for murder. Then they leaned into quiz shows and that ended in scandal.”

The quiz show scandals of the late ’50s rocked television, eroding public trust and painting networks as cynical manipulators. CBS, desperate to steady its image, needed something safer and the solution came in the form of homespun humor. Shows like The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction offered a vision of small-town America that was nostalgic, apolitical, and above all, safe.

“CBS was trying to find something wholesome, something not controversial, and rural comedy was their next step,” Eskridge explains. “It turned out to be a huge boon for them. Almost overnight, they went from being the Communist Broadcast System to the Country Broadcast System. Their entire reputation changed, and it hinged on this rural comedy boom. They salvaged their profits and reshaped their corporate identity on the backs of these shows.”

But just as quickly as CBS embraced the rural brand, it abandoned it when it no longer fit the network’s desired image. “They got rid of them when they were no longer serving their purpose,” Eskridge says bluntly. “It’s a truly American story of capitalism driving everything.”

Nostalgia that never fades

Eskridge argues that the canceled rural comedies continue to resonate because of their timeless nostalgia. Andy Griffith himself described The Andy Griffith Show as nostalgic for his childhood in the 1930s, while viewers in the 1960s, in turn, treated it as nostalgia for an idealized past. And audiences today see it as a window into a bygone era.

“There’s something timeless about them,” Eskridge says. “There’s always this idea that there might’ve been a place once where everything was perfect, where neighbors were best friends, families stuck together and nobody fought over politics at Thanksgiving. That kind of wistful hope appeals to people regardless of the generation.”