Green Acres reversed the narrative hook of The Beverly Hillbillies, which was that of city folks moving to the country. Prestigious lawyer Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert) and his socialite wife, Lisa (Eva Gabor), trade in their exhausting Park Avenue existence for the simple country pleasures, which they imagine await them wrapped in a cloak of Jeffersonian idealism, glorious sunrises, and the smell of new­-mown hay. What they find instead is a consensus reality that flies in the face of Cartesian logic, Newtonian physics, and Harvard-sanctioned positivism. Al­ bert, who made his film debut in Brother Rat opposite Ronald Reagan, takes refuge in the same reductionist platitudes his former co-star eventually learned to trade on quite deftly, but those platitudes ultimately prove no match. Meanwhile, Gabor (who with her sisters Zsa Zsa and Magda had by this time been dubbed "mythological" by Dorothy Parker) embraces this new order with a circular instinct worthy of Gracie Allen herself (Henning's longtime employer). Against all odds, Lisa flourishes, coaxing the chickens to lay square eggs, bringing a world-class symphony conductor to Hooterville, establishing a state-of-the-art beauty salon in Sam Drucker's General Store, and, of course, perfecting her signature biological weapons­ grade hotcakes.

     Also populating this wrinkle in critical reasons are a healthy cross section of supporting eccentrics. These include Mr. Haney (Pat Buttram), the hornswoggling con man whose bargains invariably cost the Douglases several times their face value. Buttram once served as Gene Autry's sidekick and claimed he based his character loosely on Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley's legendary shadowy manager, whom he had known as a carnival entrepreneur in the 1940s, where he ran a booth featuring dancing chickens. County agent Hank Kimball's "discourses on plant and animal husbandry rival those of a semiotics professor" (according to Marc), and this character played by Alvy Moore personifies a kind of infinite regress, where every empirical statement branches into multiple statements that in turn preclude it, spiraling each new observation back and away from itself like an inductive Escherism. Fred and Doris Ziffle (Hank Patterson and Barbara Pepper; later Fran Ryan) are the beaming parents of Arnold, a 250-pound adolescent pig, which watches television, is writing a book, visits Washington on scholarship, and ultimately falls in love with Mr. Haney's pet basset hound. 

     Green Acres was canceled in 1971 when CBS consciously targeted a younger demographic audience and purged its so-called rural comedies. Its user-friendly absurdism became one of the cornerstones of the mock-patriotic revivalism of the Nickelodeon Chan­nel's "Nick at Nite" lineup in the early 1990s.