Granby's Green Acres
A Summer That Planted Something
Granby's Green Acres ran for just seven weeks on CBS — Monday nights at 9:30, July 3 through August 21, 1950 — and then it was gone. It drew a dismissive review from Variety, which called it "a brave but futile effort to put together a situation comedy around Gale Gordon" and faulted the first episode for "a tepid script" and actors who "couldn't improve the show's mediocrity." And yet the show quietly became the seed of one of television's most distinctive sitcoms. Fifteen years later, Jay Sommers — the radio show's writer, producer, and director — pitched CBS a revival of his original concept, and Green Acres ran on television from 1965 to 1971. The radio version is a footnote, but it's an interesting one.
The premise came from two places. Sommers, born in Troy, New York in 1917, drew on memories of time he spent as a boy on a farm near Greendale, New York, where his stepfather tried — and failed — to make the land pay. He also found creative inspiration in S.J. Perelman's humor book Acres and Pains, which treated the city-person-farms-badly premise as deadpan absurdist material. The result was a comedy about John Granby, an ex-bank teller who leaves his professional life behind to become a farmer, and his long-suffering wife Martha, who goes along with the whole idea.
The Cast and Where They Came From
Gale Gordon played John Granby, and Bea Benaderet played his wife Martha. The pairing wasn't invented for this show — both actors had been playing similar characters on the Lucille Ball comedy My Favorite Husband, where Gordon was Rudolph Atterbury (George Cooper's boss) and Benaderet was Iris, Rudolph's wife. The character names changed; the dynamic carried over. Benaderet's biography describes Granby's Green Acres as her "one and only full-fledged starring role on radio."
The connection to My Favorite Husband runs deeper than the casting. Gordon and Benaderet had both been given first consideration for the roles that became Fred and Ethel Mertz on I Love Lucy, but contract conflicts forced each of them to decline. Their radio chemistry never quite found the right vehicle — this show included, if Variety was right about the scripts.
Parley Baer played Eb, the hired hand. Baer had begun his radio career in 1933 at KSL in Salt Lake City and served as a captain in the Army Air Corps during World War II, earning seven battle stars in the Pacific theater. He would go on to originate the role of Chester on the radio version of Gunsmoke in 1952 and later play Mayor Roy Stoner on The Andy Griffith Show. Howard McNear, who played the storekeeper Will Kimble in the first broadcast episode (Horace Murphy took over in later episodes), would co-star with Baer on both of those productions. Louise Erickson played the Granbys' daughter Janice — a character that didn't survive into the television version. The supporting cast also included Hans Conried.
How It Got Started (and Why It Didn't Stay)
The show had been in development for some time before it actually aired. In 1948, a version was auditioned for ABC radio with actor Hanley Stafford set to star; it didn't go anywhere. An unaired pilot titled "Granby Quits His Job" was recorded on March 30, 1950, nearly three months before CBS put the series on as a summer replacement for Lux Radio Theatre.
Eight episodes aired. A recurring gag had the county agricultural agent consistently ending up eating Granby's supper. In the final episode, Gordon's character urged listeners to write their local CBS affiliate to support the show. It didn't come back.
Five of the eight broadcast episodes survive, along with the unaired pilot — six recordings in all. The titles of two broadcast episodes remain unknown. Known surviving titles include "Granby Plants a Crop," "Granby Discovers Electricity," "Fighting the Love Bug," "Granby Lays an Egg," and the August 21 finale, "Mr. Granby Breaks Down."
What Came After
Jay Sommers had been writing for radio since 1940, when he started as a gag writer for Milton Berle on the Blue Network. By the time he created Granby's Green Acres, he had written for The Alan Young Show, Eddie Cantor, Spike Jones, Lum and Abner, and Red Skelton. After the radio show ended, he moved into television, writing for Amos and Andy, Dennis the Menace, and Petticoat Junction.
When CBS producer Paul Henning needed a third half-hour comedy in 1965 to follow The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction, he turned to Sommers. Sommers proposed reviving his old radio concept. The main character became an attorney named Oliver Wendell Douglas rather than a bank teller, the daughter was dropped from the premise, and early proposed titles included Country Cousins and The Eddie Albert Show before Green Acres was settled on. Neither Gordon nor Benaderet could reprise their radio roles — Gordon was committed to The Lucy Show and Benaderet to Petticoat Junction. Sommers went on to write roughly 150 of the television series' 170 episodes. One early TV episode, in which Oliver can't decide what to plant, was adapted directly from the radio episode "Mr. Granby Plants a Crop." In April 1985, USC's School of Cinematic Arts held a retrospective honoring Sommers's contributions — described as the first such event dedicated to a single TV series at the university — and drew over a thousand attendees.
The radio show itself didn't earn much notice in its time. But as a working draft for something that lasted six television seasons, it's worth knowing about.