Media Musings: New reality show would make impact
CBS plans to put a rural family on display in a new “Beverly Hillbillies” reality show and it’s drawing intense fire from the Center for Rural Strategies, headquartered in Whitesburg, Ky.
You may remember the show, which had a huge national audience. A poor, white family hit oil and moved to one of the richest cities in the world, Beverly Hills. Buddy Epson played the lead and the show often led to water cooler retellings of its bizarre situations.
The passage of time, however, does make a difference. When the show aired there wasn’t a center devoted to help the South fight its cruel and relentless poverty. The Center for Rural Strategies has run full-page ads in the major newspapers attacking CBS and its president, Les Moonves, personally.
Here’s just one salvo: “Watching rural people being ridiculed in front of a national audience may be CBS’s notion of entertainment. But for most of us, mocking a group of rural Americans who have endured, despite hardship and inequality, is more than just offensive. It raises troubling questions about CBS management and the advertisers sponsoring these programs.”
Certainly, research shows the truth of the center’s outcry. Forty percent of the nation’s poor live in the South. Half of the people receiving food assistance are children. One-third of the children in the South live in poverty. Half of all adults receiving food assistance are working. Half of the people receiving food assistance are children. Sixteen percent of the poor are elderly.
It’s in this hardscrabble world that the center lives and works and sees every day of every year. It sees true courage, the hard grit needed to make such realities any kind of a life of hope, at least for the children.
So, against these hard realities, it’s understandable to hear the cry of outrage and anger and frustration. And the fact that all TV broadcast networks are in a battle to sustain what’s left of their audiences doesn’t matter. Reality, the every day kind, matters to them.
The center’s ads have drawn little support from talk show babblers. They point out that it’s just an attempt at humor and entertainment and it’s not an episode of “Frontline” or “60 Minutes.” Well, it isn’t. But let’s revisit a show that certainly did little to enhance the South: “Hee Haw,” which won a regional Emmy.
“Hee Haw” was produced in Nashville with country stars and was a country version of “Laugh-In,” running silly humor and music. Roy Clark was one of its top performers. Its linkage to Nashville hardly gave the impression that the city was “The Athens of the South.” But, again, it was entertainment, and some could argue that being able to laugh at oneself is a mark of maturity.
But there’s reason to think again on that argument. When my daughter began graduate studies at Loyola of Chicago, she felt the elitism of her fellow students, who started using negative stereotypes of the South in her presence. Tired of their barbs, she finally shot back: “You all should know, darling, that all of my family has shoes.” The sarcasm worked.
When asked, she said the reason they felt so comfortable about using stereotypes and ridicule was because they had never been in the South. To them, it was Hicksville.
Perhaps that’s the point of the center’s message. But there ‘s been a huge migration of blacks and whites to the South in the past 15 years and times have changed radically in terms of personal wealth, the economy, racism, voting rights, and development.
There’s one bright spot, though. Reality shows are stupid, staged events that are cheap to make. The revival of “The Beverly Hillbillies” will fit right into the “genre,” if there is one for this kind of programming. Like every desperate network attempt for audiences, it will fade away and go into the CBS archive. But to claim it has no impact, or that it’s bringing no pain to anyone is totally disingenuous.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)