The Beverly Hillbillies The Beverly Hillbillies The Beverly Hillbillies is an American sitcom (situation comedy) television series originally broadcast on CBS from 1962 to 1971. The show had an ensemble cast featuring Buddy Ebsen, Irene Ryan, Donna Douglas, and Max Baer Jr. as the Clampetts, a poor backwoods family from the Ozarks region who move to posh Beverly Hills, California, after striking oil on their land. The show was produced by Filmways and was created by writer 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
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