Acres of Corn but Nuggets of Satire

I’ve long had a pet theory that only one network television show truly captured the spirit of the ‘60s counterculture while it was in full bloom.

It wasn’t any of those painfully “relevant” dramatic shows such as “The Mod Squad” (basically “Dragnet” with long hair) or “The Bold Ones,” a rotating series that incorporated “The New Doctors, “The Lawyers,” “The Protectors” and “The Senators,” all just teeming with stern-faced young urban professionals.

It wasn’t “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” a pseudo-hip comedy-variety show that may genuinely have revolutionized the way TV looks but that generally laughed at, not with, the hippie generation.

And it certainly wasn’t “Love American Style,” which often featured vignettes about sex, drugs or rock ‘n’ roll but always wound up treating the revolution with a sneer.

So what was it? “Green Acres.”

To me, the anarchic comedy about a principled, successful big-city lawyer who abandoned his practice to take up farming was the only network TV show that really reflected the anti-Establishment ethos of those days.

And not just the ethos, but the sad reality as well: The clear-eyed idealist at the core of “Green Acres” was surrounded by a plethora of bandwagon jumpers, only along for the zany ride.

It was this precept--one sane, highly principled man trying to find his way while all hell was breaking loose around him--that separated “Green Acres” from network TV’s more conscious attempts to capitalize on the social upheaval.

The series, which ran in 1965-71, has remained popular via reruns for the last two decades. Locally, it can be seen twice each weekday on Anaheim’s oldies TV station KDOC Channel 56. On Friday, viewers have a chance to drop in anew on the goofy residents of Hooterville, U.S.A., in a new reunion movie to be shown on CBS.

Ostensibly, “Green Acres” was merely a spinoff from the hayseed comedy “Petticoat Junction,” which introduced the nation to the backward town of Hooterville. And in a sense, that show started out as “Beverly Hillbillies” in reverse: sophisticated, wealthy urbanites moving to the country for one comic misadventure after another.

But there were significant differences between the shows that may have easily been overlooked by the casual viewer.

Beneath the corn-pone surface of such rural comedies as “Petticoat Junction” and “Beverly Hillbillies” was a smug condescension toward life in the country: The rural lifestyle was painted as something most viewers could feel safe, and superior, in snickering at.

“Green Acres” had a notably different subtext. Successful Manhattan lawyer Oliver Wendell Douglas--whose name not coincidentally was a hybrid of two great liberal Supreme Court justices, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and William O. Douglas--consciously rejected the perks of Establishment society in favor of a new life more closely rooted to the land.

He often recited eloquent speeches about his yearning to get away from the rat race, to dig his fingers deep into the rich brown soil and to revel at the sight of seeds he had planted sprouting up toward the nourishing warmth of the sun.

Those testimonials, usually accompanied by a fife in the background playing “Yankee Doodle,” were often lost on his fellow farmers, who would have snapped up his abandoned penthouse in a New York minute.

Yet Douglas never looked down on his neighbors. Rather, he envied them for their skill in nurturing life--the one thing all his educational, professional and social training had not equipped him for.

Like the few who truly shaped the ‘60s counterculture, Oliver Douglas was a true visionary, believing in his heart that he would be happier and more fulfilled by a life of honest work that yielded modest but tangible rewards, more like the agrarian America that predated the Industrial Revolution.

Oliver’s wife, Lisa, was the reluctant co-revolutionary who was behind her husband 1,000%--as long as she didn’t have to give up her designer gowns and tiaras.

The floundering, hormonally unbalanced hired hand, Eb, hadn’t a clue about the ideals that drove Oliver. Like most of his teen-age contemporaries, afloat in something much larger than he understood, Eb just wanted to know what was in it for him.

Mr. Haney, the greedy, anything-for-a-buck entrepreneur, represented both the worst and best of American free-market capitalism. With the Monroe brothers handyman team, “Green Acres” made a comment on those well-meaning but inept fix-it-from-within types, who wound up destroying what they were trying to repair. County agent Hank Kimball was the perennially bumbling government official who never knew whether he was coming or going.

In one of the show’s more blatant comments on the U.S. political process, Oliver accepted an invitation to campaign as Hooterville’s representative to the county seat. Doe-eyed Lisa said to him: “I thought you had to be an actor to run for office.”

To which he quipped, “No, that’s only if you run for governor.”

The revolution won’t be televised? For a time it was. You just had to peek behind the corn to see it.

“Return to Green Acres” airs Friday at 9 p.m. on KCBS Channel 2.