TV Networks Believe There’s Gold in Them Thar Hillbilly Shows of Yesteryear

Days after CBS disclosed it was planning a new reality series inspired by “The Beverly Hillbillies,” Fox said is borrowing the concept of another classic rural sitcom, “Green Acres,” for a show of its own.

A Fox spokesman said the network is developing a reality series that, similar to the original “Green Acres,” turns the idea of “The Beverly Hillbillies” on its head by transplanting upper-crust yuppie-types from the big city to a rural setting and surrounding them with farm animals and plain folks with drawls.

Cameras will follow members of an erstwhile high-society family, cut off from their luxury cars, health clubs and bank accounts, as they move into rustic new digs, go about finding work, buy groceries and generally hobnob with the hoi polloi.

Last month, CBS said its talent scouts were fanning out across the backwoods of America in search of a rural family willing to move into a Beverly Hills mansion for a separate show tentatively titled “The Real Beverly Hillbillies.”

The “Green Acres” reality concept has been in development for several weeks by Bunim-Murray Productions, which makes MTV’s “The Real World,” Fox spokesman Scott Grogin said.

Fox said the project was still in its early stages, with no time frame set for actual production or launch.

Also unknown is whether the series will even use the name “Green Acres,” as neither Fox nor Bunim-Murray owns rights to the title. “Green Acres,” which aired from 1965 to 1971, starred Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor as a highly successful Manhattan lawyer and his glamorous wife who give up their cosmopolitan life and penthouse apartment to live on a farm near the fictional small town of Hooterville.

The show was closely intertwined with “Petticoat Junction,” another rural sitcom created in the wake of the success of “The Beverly Hillbillies”--which was about a backwoods family from the Ozarks who strike oil and move their household into a Beverly Hills mansion next door to a greedy banker.

All three series aired on CBS during the 1960s.

Meanwhile, Fox also reported that “The Rats,” a made-for-TV movie about rats invading the Big Apple, will make its belated debut this month.

The movie about an invasion of lab rats into the sewers of New York will finally see the light of day on Sept. 19, a year and two days after it was originally set to debut, according to Fox spokeswoman Julie Verville.

But in an acknowledgment that all is not the same in New York, the network edited out two background scenes showing the twin towers that were destroyed in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

The major networks went to uninterrupted, around-the-clock news coverage in the days after the attacks, preempting all other scheduled shows.

“The scenes were edited out to make [the movie] more current,” Verville said. “There was nothing happening to the World Trade Center. Sensitivity was also a factor, but it was also to bring it up to date.”

Fox’s decision to delay the debut of “The Rats,” shot in March 2001, for more than a year was less a product of concerns over taste and suitability and more due to scheduling issues, Verville said.

“We just didn’t have a time slot up until this point,” she said.