Return of the Beverly Hillbillies Max Baer Jr. (the original Jethro) who declined to participate. The film was produced and written by original series creator Paul Henning and was intended as a pilot for a proposed revival of the series, but this never materialized. "Return of the Beverly Hillbillies" premiered as "The CBS Tuesday Night Movie" on October 6, 1981. Following the death of Granny, Jed Clampett returned to his roots to live in a backwoods cabin in the town of Bug Tussle rather than living alone at his Beverly Hills mansion after having voluntarily divided his massive fortune between daughter Elly May and nephew
James T. Aubrey on the schedule anyway. "The hucksters' huckster," David Halberstam labeled him, "whose greatest legacy to television was a program called "The Beverly Hillbillies", a series so demented and tasteless that it boggles the mind" Columnist Murray Kempton described "The Beverly Hillbillies" as, "a confrontation of the characters of John Steinbeck with the environment of Spyros Skouras," the extravagant chairman of Twentieth Century Fox. But regardless of what anyone said about "Hillbillies", the public loved it. The Nielsen ratings showed 57 million were watching the show – one in three Americans. When Skouras was forced out of Fox by the company's