The Beverly Hillbillies was a 1960s sitcom smash, pitting two particularly American stereotypes — the shoeless, aw-shucks hillbilly and the Monopoly Man millionaire — against one another. But its success in the United States doesn’t explain why viewers across the pond found a backwoods family from the Ozarks so hilarious.
“The English see more humor in this show than Americans do,” Buddy Ebsen, who played hillbilly patriarch Jed Clampett, told The Charlotte News in 1965, as reported by MeTV. Ebsen couldn’t figure out exactly why Brits loved his Hillbillies, but his visit to England that year confirmed the show’s popularity. He and his family toured the home of the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, where he was treated like royalty.
The reasons why The Beverly Hillbillies was a hit overseas aren’t that hard to understand. At its core, the show featured a classic culture clash, with the seemingly ignorant poor folk constantly triumphing over the high-status richies. There was plenty of “fish out of water” humor as well, with the Clampetts mislabeling swimming pools as “cement ponds” and gushing oil as “Texas tea.”
Ebsen himself hit on one of the show’s key appeals, recognizing that the hillbillies shared a “kinship with country people everywhere.” Even though England’s poor didn’t share an accent with country folk from Missouri, they suffered from the same struggles and slights brought on by the rich.
Ebsen understood that his character was the core of the show, even though it took producers a little while to catch on. “They changed my part a little, ya know,” Ebsen told The Charlotte News. “For a time, I was nothing but a hillbilly straight man feeding straight lines to the others. But they put more backbone in old Jed.”
In a later interview with The Democrat and Chronicle, Ebsen expanded on why Jed resonated with viewers around the world: “We let viewers know there are several kinds of fathers in the world.”
Everyone — American or British — needs a father figure, “and old Jed Clampett is just that,” Ebsen said. “Our success is the same as that of Bonanza. Papa Cartwright has the same sort of appeal. Their families love and respect them.”
It’s as good an explanation as any for the show’s popularity. Despite terrible reviews (The New York Times called it “strained and unfunny”), the show finished at the top of the Nielsen ratings in each of its first two seasons. “We’ve never been out of the top ten,” Ebsen said in 1966. “And with a little luck, maybe we can stay up there for a few more years — no matter what the critics say.”
