The frenzied commentary this year over a Mexican actress of Kenyan descent playing Helen of Troy (Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey), along with a gay, skirt-wearing Klingon in Starfleet Academy,black lesbian witches in Disney+’s Star Wars productThe Acolyte,and the cultural appropriation of Bridgertonand other shows where classic European stories are repopulated with African (and sometimes Asian or Latin) actors isn’t new. As leftists like AOC make distinctions between Woke 1.0 and Woke 2.0, recall that DEI 1.0 in television happened back in 1970 and 1971, with the “rural purge,” where successful shows about rural, largely white, small towns were cancelled, and replaced with new sitcoms and dramas featuring urban black families as well as single career women who were going to make it on their own.
Successful shows like The Real McCoys, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw, The Andy Griffith Show, Gomer PyleandMayberry RFDwere cancelled the same year, replaced withThe Jeffersons, Maude, Mary Tyler Moore, The Flip Wilson Show, All in the Family, Sanford and Sons, Good Times, or Welcome Back, Kotter. The Beverly Hillbillies was eventually “colorized” to become The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. There was even a precursor to Cheers, The Corner Bar (1972-1973) starring Anne Meara and Alan King, that featured a twentysomething Vincent Schiavelli (the subway ghost in Ghost) as America’s first regular gay character.
It wasn’t the case that there were no blacks on TV before 1970, and no rural whites afterwards. Toward the end of their runs shows like Mayberry RFD had added black (and Italian, etc.) families to their neighborhoods. Diahann Carroll had starred as a widowed (African-American) nurse, now a single mom, in Julia (1968-1971). And a rural show, The Waltons, which pushed a cloying liberalism, survived well into the 1970s. But the shift was still dramatic.
I watched all of these shows. Funny, well-crafted, characters you could care about.
The cultural commentary about them is, I suspect, largely ignorant and fake. You’ll be told that radio in the 1940s and 50s was very diverse, and then TV in the 50s became monochromatic because of a “red scare” and the networks being afraid of discussing divisive issues like the war in Vietnam.
But the red scare—communist infiltration of the arts and culture—was real, as we now know from historians like Ronald Radosh and Hollywood chroniclers like Diana McLellan. (An irony for progressives is that Hollywood communists would use subtle threats of exposure and blackmail to get gay and lesbian actors to donate money to, endorse, or appear at events of communist front groups.) And if the networks offered insufficient variety or stayed away from controversial topics, any libertarian can tell you that’s due to Federal Communications Commission licensure and government ownership of the airwaves. As with much government regulation, only a large corporation can afford the lawyers, lobbyists and accountants needed to apply for permits and wade through government paperwork, and as a result, until cable and then streaming came along, three networks produced shows each aimed at the widest possible, non-niche, audience.
The real reason there were rural-oriented television in the late-1950s and early-60s is because there was an explosion of television sets then. From 1955 to 1963 the U.S. went from 30 million television sets to 50 million. One of them was my grandmother’s, the first TV set I ever watched, in a rural Tennessee county with a population of just over 20,000 people. In the late-1950s close to 90 percent of urban homes already had TV, while in rural areas it was below 75 percent; throughout the 60s urban penetration went up to 95 percent, but the urban-rural divide almost disappeared. According to the Census Bureau in 1950 “(n)early 4.4 million households with television sets were urban whereas only 154,000 farms owned a set.” The 20 million new TV consumers were mainly rural. That’s a pretty good explanation for the popularity of “rural” shows in the 1960s, rather than fantasies about Joe McCarthy.
Now that there’s cable and streaming, people can have BET, Telemundo, the gay Logos channel and the bicurious Bravo, and the market can also provide shows that allow the urban viewer to fantasize about a more peaceful, slower paced rural life.
It started in 2020, with Big Sky, where a blonde, white female detective (and her black sidekick) solve crimes in Montana against backdrops of huge open skies and giant mountain ranges. But now it’s exploded, with white (or white presenting) actors in small towns all over north America. The difference from the 1960s rural shows: the lead is often female, she’s often in law enforcement (or politics) and solving crimes.
Three of these shows feature brunette beauties: Morena Baccarin (of Homeland,V, and the Deadpool movies) is a Pacific northwest county’s first female sheriff in Sheriff Country,whose second season premiers October 9; Kristen Kreuk (Smallville) plays the girlfriend of the sheriff (Rossif Sutherland, Donald Sutherland’s other kid), also in a small town in the Pacific northwest, in Murder in a Small Town(third season filming now); and Abigail Spencer (Mad Men, Rectify, Cowboys and Aliens) plays the girlfriend of Dr. Martin Best (Josh Charles) in Best Medicine, where she helps solve medical mysteries in small town New England. And then there’s the huge output of very popular shows (Yellowstone, Landman, Dutton Ranch) from Taylor Sheridan. And even in Syfy, shows like Resident Alien and The Last of Us feature rural and small town settings.
