“Green Acres” May Be Coming Back To TV
Posted November 19, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The Hollywood writers’ strike in the U.S. has left viewers facing the prospect of a plethora of game shows, reality programs and news documentaries – along with endless reruns. But now there’s a new concept in the works and it’s a repeat performance of sorts. What if producers used old and proven scripts to recreate a new version of a show that ran for years and years?
That’s what Richard L. Bare is planning. If his name somehow rings a bell in the deepest cobwebs of your memory it’s because you saw it every week on the director’s credit of the classic 60s sitcom ” Green Acres.” Now Bare has acquired the rights to all the scripts penned by its creator, the brilliant Jay Sommers, from the scribe’s widow and plans to remake the show with a new cast, creating a strike-proof TV series using proven material.
“Studios are going to be searching for properties that have been written and ready to go into production without upsetting WGA ( Writers Guild of America) in any way,” he explains.
The pilot script is set a month after the series’ 1971 finale, but you may not notice because the show never had an official “last” episode. “Green Acres” is one of the most bizarre TV series in the medium’s history. It started out as a sort of anti-Beverly Hillbillies, and featured Eddie Albert as a New York City lawyer who always wanted to be a farmer. He dragged his wife, played in a revelation-starring role by Eva Gabor, to the town of Hooterville, where the pair encountered some of the strangest characters ever created.
After a rather ordinary first season, it suddenly morphed into surrealistic TV, in which characters saw and read the credits, pigs barked like dogs and could be understood by humans (except Albert’s lead character, Oliver Wendell Douglas), and a lady carpenter was named Ralph.
Bare has hired a casting director to find lookalikes for the actors who will be recreating the parts and is scouting locations. “Green Acres” has been remade before, including a not very impressive 1990 TV movie starring the original cast that didn’t have Somers’ script input. It was also the subject of a recent reality show that sent city slickers to live in the country.
New versions of old series have been redone in past instances but this may be the first time one is using the original scripts to bring a classic back to TV. But didn’t look for the “place to be” just yet. There’s no word on just who might air such a show, whether it will work without its original cast or if it will be given the green light to get made at all.
There’s another possibility that’s kind of disturbing to fans of the original – Bare is also shopping the 168 scripts to other shows, like “The Office,” in hopes they may buy some of them and do a “Green Acres”-inspired episode while the strike drags on.
There is a glimmer of hope or two in the walkout, which centres on profits from DVD and Internet sales. Both sides have at least agreed to start talking again – something they haven’t done for almost a month. Some shows have already gone into reruns. Others will run out of fresh episodes in the coming weeks.
