A Man for Elly

 The Beverly Hillbillies - Season 2, Episode 15 (1964) -  - HENRY GIBSON

The Beverly Hillbillies is an American television sitcom that was broadcast on CBS from 1962 to 1971. It had an ensemble cast featuring Buddy Ebsen, Irene Ryan, Donna Douglas, and Max Baer Jr. as the Clampetts, a poor, backwoods family from the hills of Tennessee, who move to posh Beverly Hills, California, after striking oil on their land. The show was produced by Filmways and was created by Paul Henning. It was followed by two other Henning-inspired "country cousin" series on CBS: Petticoat Junction and its spin-off Green Acres, which reversed the rags-to-riches, country-to-city model of The Beverly Hillbillies.

The Beverly Hillbillies ranked among the top 20 most-watched programs on television for eight of its nine seasons, ranking as the No. 1 series of the year during its first two seasons, with 16 episodes that still remain among the 100 most-watched television episodes in American history.^[1] It accumulated seven Emmy nominations during its run. It remains in syndicated reruns, and its ongoing popularity spawned a 1993 film adaptation by 20th Century Fox.^[2]

Premise[edit]

The series starts with Jed Clampett, an impoverished and widowed hillbilly living alongside an oil-rich swamp with his daughter and mother-in-law. The start of each episode shows Jed discovering oil while shooting at a rabbit. However, in the first episode the oil is discovered by a surveyor for the OK Oil Company who realizes the size of the oil field, and the company pays him a fortune for the right to drill on his land. Patriarch Jed's cousin Pearl Bodine prods him to move to California after being told his modest property could yield millions of dollars, and pressures him into taking her son Jethro along. The family moves into a mansion in wealthy Beverly Hills, California, next door to Jed's banker, Milburn Drysdale, and his wife, Margaret, who has zero tolerance for hillbillies.

The Clampetts bring a moral, unsophisticated, and minimalistic lifestyle to the swanky, sometimes self-obsessed and superficial community. Double entendres and cultural misconceptions are the core of the sitcom's humor. Plots often involve Drysdale's outlandish efforts to keep the Clampetts' money in his bank, and his wife's efforts to rid the neighborhood of "those hillbillies". The family's periodic attempts to return to the mountains are often prompted by Granny's perceiving a slight from one of the "city folk".

Characters[edit]

Three of the main characters – Jed, Granny and Elly May – appear in all 274 episodes. Jethro (272 episodes) is not in the last two episodes of the series, having gone into hiding to avoid an anticipated marriage proposal.

Jed Clampett[edit]

Jed Clampett (portrayed by Buddy Ebsen), has little formal education and is completely naïve about the world outside the area where he lives, but has a great deal of wisdom and common sense. His forebears are revealed in series 1 episode 25 to have come to America before the Mayflower arrived. However he later denies this to keep Mrs. Drysdale happy. He is the widower of Granny's daughter, Rose Ellen (though Buddy Ebsen was only 5 years Irene Ryan's junior). He is the son of Luke Clampett and his wife, and has a sister called Myrtle. In episode 13 it is revealed that his grandfather was 98 when he married his grandmother who was 18. Jed is a good-natured man and the head of the family. In a very early episode Jed tells Elly May that she is the spitting image of her mother. The huge oil pool in the swamp he owned was the beginning of his rags-to-riches journey to Beverly Hills. He is usually the straight man to Granny and Jethro's antics. His catchphrase is, "Welllllll, doggies!"^[3]