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Must Hee-Haw TV
Yes, them big-city folks at CBS are fixin' to build a brand-spankin'-new reality series around you and your backwoods kin. The show's (tentative) name: The Real Beverly Hillbillies.
Well, hee-haw!
Casting agents began "combing mountainous rural regions" in the South this week, CBS spokesman Chris Ender says, in search of the all-new, all-real Hillbillies.
The perfect Podunk family will be a multigenerational clan consisting of at least five members--not counting livestock. Banjo-picking talent is optional.
As always, though, location is everything. Producers say they're especially interested in making fun of--er, featuring--folks from Arkansas, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky and North Carolina. (Sorry, Alabama. That's what you get for going with indoor plumbing.)
If them Hollywood casting folk don't descend on your swamp, don't worry. CBS has set up a hotline to field calls from the Deliverance set: 323-993-7104.
No word on how many calls CBS has received so far. (No word on how many members of the Deliverance set have phones.)
For the lucky family, The Real Beverly Hillbillies will mean moving from your shack to the 90210 zip code, where you'll be plied with maids and money for one year, your every misadventure preserved for broadcast by an army of TV cameras.
"It's a great fish-out-of-water story," CBS programming exec Ghen Maynard tells Daily Variety, one of them-thar papers them Hollywood city slickers read. "A lot of it will be funny, but a lot of it will be real."
If you and yours get picked, you'll join the likes of Anna Nicole Smith and Ozzy Osbourne on the reality TV circuit.
You could argue, if you were one of them brainiac types, that E!'s Anna Nicole Show and MTV's The Osbournes already document fish-out-of-water tales. What is Smith, after all, but a Texas girl who struck oil in modeling? And what is Ozzy Osbourne but a heavy-metal god who landed in suburbia with the wife and kids?
Smith and Osbourne, however, were already famous when their shows premiered. The Real Beverly Hillbillies will be made up of unwitting civilians, which raises the question: What in tarnation is CBS trying to do? Make fun of good country folk?!
"The intent is to be respective...," Maynard tells Variety. "[But] we want a family who has a sense of humor about themselves."
The Real Beverly Hillbillies is inspired by the fake Beverly Hillbillies, the 1962-71 CBS sitcom.
That ratings powerhouse, about dumbass Appalachians who accidentally hit an oil gusher, helped grow a crop of down-home shows (Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Hee Haw, Mayberry R.F.D.) that dominated the CBS schedule until network execs presumably got sick of grits and sent the whole lot of them to the woodshed after the 1970-71 season.
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