One of the most celebrated sitcoms of the past decade, Schitt’s Creek, was sometimes referred to, conceptually, as a “modern-day Green Acres” or a “reverse Beverly Hillbillies”, but there’s probably a reason that marketing didn’t make the show a hit in its early seasons.
Gen Z kids, with the entirety of entertainment history now at their fingertips, haven’t poured too much of their focus into lowbrow 1960s sitcoms. Once upon a time, however, in that fabled era when there were only three television networks in America, just about everybody could tell you about the adventures of the fictional Clampett family, unsophisticated Ozark mountain folk who struck oil, made a fortune, and moved into a mansion in LA’s swankiest neighbourhood. The fish-out-of-water jokes write themselves (starting with the show’s punny title), and they kept doing so for nearly an entire decade.
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At the height of The Beverly Hillbillies’ popularity over its first few seasons, between 1962 and 1965, it was the most-watched television programme in America, bar none. The show’s average Nielsen rating over the 1963-64 TV season alone was 39.1, which means that a little less than half of all US households were tuning in every week. For comparison, the 2026 Super Bowl, usually the most-watched single-event programme on American television every year, scored essentially the same rating, at 39.7, while a typical weekly network comedy is now lucky to score a 3.0 or a 4.0. The Clampetts were doing Super Bowl numbers on a weekly basis.
Combine that with syndicated broadcasts of reruns, plus expansion into international TV markets, and the enormity of The Beverly Hillbillies’ influence really sets in. This was the pure monoculture, and no TV show of the 21st century, be it Game of Thrones or Stranger Things or Yellowstone, has come anywhere close to reaching the same percentage of the population.
Did The Beverly Hillbillies use its position of influence to explore critically important topics of the ’60s, like the civil rights movement or the Vietnam War? Eh, no, not really. It did help boost the profile of bluegrass music in an unexpectedly positive way, however, as the show’s opening theme song, ‘The Ballad of Jed Clampett’, became a number one country hit and inspired a lot of people who didn’t normally listen to country music to seek out more traditional banjo and fiddle tunes.
It certainly didn’t hurt that the producer of the show, Paul Henning, had recruited a couple of bluegrass legends to perform its theme song. With Lester Flatt on guitar and Earl Scruggs on banjo – AKA the Foggy Mountain Boys – they laid down the track with Jerry Scoggins on vocals, telling the tale of the Clampetts’ switch from rags to riches.
“Well the first thing you know, Jed’s a millionaire / Kinfolk said Jed move away from there / Said California is the place you oughta be / So they loaded up the truck, and they moved to Beverly (Hills, that is. Swimmin’ pools, movie stars).”
Once the show became a hit, Flatt and Scruggs put out a vinyl single of the tune, with Flatt on vocals, and that’s the one that raced up the charts.
Within the bluegrass community, Flatt and Scruggs were already celebrated musicians dating back to the 1940s. When Henning saw them perform in LA and offered them the TV gig, they weren’t completely sure about it at first. Fortunately, Louise Scruggs, Earl’s wife and manager, saw a Clampett-esque opportunity for an overnight cash haul, and the deal was signed. The fact that the show raised the profile of bluegrass as a whole was just a welcome bonus.
“That’s one thing that spread country music and five-string banjo all over the world,” Louise told Landmark News in 2001. “It was a big boost.”
Even long after the show went off the air in 1971, Earl Scruggs admitted that he still watched the occasional rerun himself, including a few where he and Flatt made on-screen cameos. “They’re still funny to me,” he said in 2001. “They were so well-written. They were tremendous people to work with, really professional.”
While Scruggs’s banjo is the famous one from The Beverly Hillbillies, the vast majority of banjo music heard on the show across its nine-year run, aside from the opening theme, was actually played by an LA session man named Don Parmley.
“Earl [Scruggs] got all the credit,” Parmley told the Roanoke Times in 1985, “and I made all the money.” Parmley was joking about the second part. By the time the show ended, he was still working as a bus driver by day and a bluegrass player by night.