PERFECTION, WRETCHED, NORMAL, AND NOWHERE: A REGIONAL PONOGRAPHY OF AMERICAN TELEVISION SETTINGS

 NEBRASKA 
Unlike its Plains-Midwest neighbors, Kansas and the Dakotas, Nebraska has never served 
as the setting for a western or, for that matter, a drama of any genre. All four of its entries have 
had contemporary settings and a comic tone. They were also all doomed, none lasting more than 
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three months, and all appearing as summer replacements—television‘s version of the clearance 
rack. Nebraska did have the distinction of hosting one of the Midwest‘s few reality television 
programs, although ―distinction‖ might not be the appropriate word for Tommy Lee Goes to 
College, which lasted for six weeks in 2005. The title subject was the 42-year-old former 
drummer for the rock band Mötley Crüe who, having missed college, set off for the University of 
Nebraska-Lincoln. Although he never officially enrolled, he did attend classes, where the 
students were awestruck and the professors less so. Tommy also formed his own fraternity, 
auditioned for the marching band, took exams and, of course, partied. The show was certainly 
never intended to be a hard-hitting look at college life, much less at Nebraska, but the backdrop 
was probably not a random choice. Depositing the shaggy-haired, tattooed, and hard-living 
California rock star into the wilds of the Midwest was almost certainly intended for comic effect, 
with one critic noting that scenes were ―carefully selected to create a ‗fish out of water‘ saga‖ 
(Gibron 2005: 1).   
Nebraska‘s three other entries have been sitcoms, and two of them did not exhibit any 
sort of midwestern stereotype. Instead, they were so formulaic that they were interchangeable 
with dozens of shows set throughout the United States. First Impressions, which ran for eight 
weeks in the summer of 1988, was the story of Frank Dutton, a single father and owner of 
―Media of Omaha,‖ a company that produced commercials. The supporting characters were 
straight from central casting—Lindsay his cute nine-year-old daughter, Mrs. Madison the nosy 
next-door neighbor, Dave his neurotic business partner, Donna his incredibly naïve receptionist, 
and Raymond, his gambling-addicted sound engineer. Rachel Gunn, R. N., which ran for thirteen 
weeks in the summer of 1992, was set in Nebraska‘s Little Innocence Hospital. It told the story 
of the cynical, but dedicated, head nurse of the surgery ward. Working alongside Rachel was a 
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typically zany and ethnically diverse cast of supporting characters, including a guileless and 
eager young nurse, a Vietnam veteran, a squeamish black orderly, and a fat, angry dietician.   
 A third Nebraska sitcom, Heartland, made greater use or, arguably, misuse of its setting, 
but did not meet with any more success, lasting just ten weeks in 1989. The show took place in 
and around the farmhouse of Tom and Casey Stafford, but the focus was on B. L. McCutcheon, 
Casey‘s father, who had been forced to move in after his own farm was repossessed by the bank. 
In true T.V.-father-in-law fashion, B. L. couldn‘t stand Tom, but was partial to his three 
grandchildren. These included Johnny, a television addict who dreamed of moving to sunny 
southern California; Kim, an adopted Vietnamese daughter; and Gus, a lumbering farm boy 
whose best friend was an enormous pet sow. B. L. was something of a Corn Belt version of 
Archie Bunker, billed in promotional material by CBS as ―an old and crusty but lovable small-
town bigot who has something insulting to say about everyone‖ (Margulies 1989: 1). For better 
or worse, Heartland was noteworthy for taking the rare step to actually set a midwestern 
program on a farm, but it relied on tired midwestern jokes. In the words of New York Times critic 
John J. O‘Connor:  
B. L. can be trying when he sounds off about big-city folk, 
including Jane Fonda, of course . . . . Moving away from 
television's standard suburban setting for sitcoms, the series 
manages to find a laugh or two in the most unlikely situations, 
including attempts by a greedy banker to get the family farm for an 
agricultural conglomerate. There is even a tornado (―God‘s way of 
telling people not to live in trailer parks,‖ one family member 
notes). Checking on the house the next morning, Tom announces, 
―It‘s still here, but there‘s a dead witch under the house and 
everything‘s in color‖ (O‘Connor 1989: 1).  
 
 
 
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THE DAKOTAS 
 
In terms of their television landscape, North and South Dakota are the least midwestern 
of the Midwest‘s states, existing strictly as a remnant of the Old West or a figment of Canadian 
imagination. The only program with a contemporary setting to use the Dakotas as a backdrop 
was the adventure comedy My Secret Identity. Seventy-two episodes of the program were 
produced in Canada for the CTV network from 1988 to 1991, with a concurrent release in 
syndication in the United States. Set in Briarwood, North Dakota, the program concerned a 
teenager who had developed superpowers after being exposed to radiation during an experiment 
his next-door neighbor, a friendly but eccentric scientist, conducted. Episodes involved typical 
events of a student‘s life, and the occasional need to thwart crime and disaster.     
The remaining three entries for the Dakotas were actually set before either state entered 
the Union, in the enormous Dakota Territory of the late 1800s. All three reflected the classic 
Western theme of a righteous man standing up to corruption and evil, and the Dakota Territory 
of television was certainly in dire need of heroes. The syndicated series Man Without a Gun 
released the first of its fifty-two episodes in the fall of 1958. Set in the 1880s, it chronicled the 
crusades of a newspaper editor, memorably named Rex Reason. As the title suggests, Reason 
primarily used his newspaper as a means of achieving law and order, but ―a good fistfight now 
and then helped things along‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 848). 1963‘s The Dakotas was a short-
lived and fairly typical oater about a U. S. Marshal and his deputies fighting crime in Bad Lands 
and Black Hills of the late 1800s. The Dakotas‘ last Western entry was its most successful. 
Featuring former football star and occasional flower pitchman Merlin Olsen, Father Murphy 
debuted in the fall of 1981 and aired for just over a year. John Murphy was a drifter during the 
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Black Hills mining boom of the 1870s. He happened upon the town of Jackson and rallied the 
local people against the town boss, whose henchman promptly blew up the miners‘ camp. This 
left Murphy to care for two dozen now-orphaned children. Posing as a priest, ―Father‖ Murphy 
opened an orphanage, and then fended off evil territory officials, who were intent on sending the 
children to a work camp.  
 
CONCLUSION 
North Dakota‘s single contemporary entry, My Secret Identity, was the story of the 
eccentrics who populated a sleepy little town—a theme not unfamiliar to midwestern television 
programs—but, for the most part, the Dakotas are the most thematically western of the 
midwestern states. All of that area‘s remaining programs took place during the days of the Old 
West, and shows like Father Murphy followed the familiar western theme of a courageous man 
standing up to corruption and evil on a wild and lawless frontier. Nebraska, on the other hand, 
has been the least western of the Plains states, with most of its shows chronicling contemporary 
urban life. The one Nebraska-based program to exploit regional stereotypes was Heartland, a 
comedy about a cantankerous old farmer and his family, but none of the state‘s programs were 
successful, and their geographic legacy almost certainly forgotten by the majority of viewers. 
The same can be said for shows set in Iowa. The state‘s mixture of comedies and dramas 
explored familiar midwestern themes—small-town life, mainstream and traditional values, and a 
population that was idealistic, industrious, and independent—but all of these programs were 
flops. Iowa did, however, provide one of the Midwest‘s most memorable television characters, 
M*A*S*H‘s Radar O‘Reilly. Like Cheers‘s Woody Boyd, Radar was an unassuming, 
dependable, polite, and likable farm kid who often served to expose the cynicism of the more 
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sophisticated characters around him. These same traits dominated the television landscape of 
Iowa‘s northern neighbor, but unlike Iowa, Minnesota has been home to three very successful 
programs. The tone and setting for these shows varied widely. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was 
the prototypical program about a modern, independent woman, and it depicted Minneapolis as a 
thriving, modern metropolis. Little House on the Prairie was the story of the sometimes harsh 
realities of life on the frontier prairie, while Coach was a goofy, escapist comedy about the 
family and work life of a harried college football coach. What unified all of these shows, though, 
were the Radar O‘Reilly-like qualities of their characters. Almost every one of them was likable, 
humble, a bit square, and excessively polite. Nearly all of Minnesota‘s lesser entries followed 
suit, featuring nice characters living in pleasant environs that were completely devoid of crime, 
poverty, and violence. 
Missouri has broken ranks with many of its Trans-Mississippi Midwest counterparts. Its 
television landscape has been more ethnically diverse, more urban, and more likely to feature 
unsavory landscapes and characters. None of Missouri‘s northern or western neighbors have 
featured the sort of urban seediness on display in The John Larroquette Show and, although it 
was set in a small town, Grace Under Fire dispensed with the nostalgia, wholesomeness, and 
sentimentality that characterized many of the region‘s programs. That said, Missouri‘s television 
landscape has also had no shortage of old-fashioned values, small-town virtues, pleasant 
families, syrupy optimism, and earthy wit. Three of Missouri‘s television icons—Red Foley, host 
of Ozark Jubilee, Jed Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies, and Sherman Potter of M*A*S*H—
had characteristics that were very much part of the Midwest‘s heartland ethos. They were warm, 
friendly, and unpretentious, and rejected anything that could be considered effete or snobbish. 
446 
 
If there is a dominant theme among Kansas‘s television entries, it is that of an admirable 
character living in unenviable circumstances. This was true of the state‘s western entries, 
particularly Gunsmoke, where the strong, fearless, and philosophical Matt Dillon battled violence 
and prejudice in an isolated town on a wild frontier. The state‘s successful contemporary 
programs also followed this theme. The goofy and likable Ernie Bilko battled boredom at a 
forgotten outpost of the U. S. Army, and the intelligent and honest residents of Smallville, which 
included no less than Superman himself, battled the forces of evil in their isolated little town. 
With the exception of the objectionable yokelism of Married to the Kellys, all of Kansas‘s lesser 
entries have followed suit. Most of the characters were likably earthy and respectable, but in 
their little towns and on their farms, they suffered from isolation, boredom, and, on more than 
one occasion, outright terror.              
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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TABLE 6. DEFINING PROGRAMS AND COMMON TRAITS: THE SOUTH 
State Defining Programs Key Program 
Elements 
Other Common 
Traits 
 
Alabama Any Day Now Poverty; race and 
racism; slow-paced 
life; friendship; strong 
women; the present 
entrenched in the past 
 
Arkansas Evening Shade A sleepy, tradition-
bound little town 
populated by colorful, 
witty, likeable 
characters 
Modern urban areas; 
rural backwaters 
Kentucky The Wonderful John 
Acton 
Good-natured, small-
town nostalgia 
Rural nostalgia 
Georgia The Dukes of Hazzard A small town and its 
rural hinterland; 
crooked politicians 
and cops; charming, 
unsophisticated, 
uneducated, populist, 
respectful heroes; 
escapism; lack of a 
middle class; country 
ingenuity   
Black vs. white, big 
city vs. backwoods, 
Old South vs. New 
South; corrupt cops 
and politicians; 
populist resistance; 
scantily clad tomboys; 
African-Americans; 
progressive, 
sophisticated, and 
generally white-collar 
Atlanta; languid small 
towns; the Civil 
Rights movement; the 
―Redneck revival‖    
Designing Women Single, intelligent; 
accomplished, 
outspoken Atlanta 
women; Old South 
charm; black 
character featured as a 
matter of course 
Matlock A respected, Harvard-
educated Atlanta 
attorney; simple, 
unassuming, country 
ingenuity; black 
character featured as a 
matter of course 
Profiler A strong female lead; 
Atlanta as somewhat 
dangerous, but 
cosmopolitan city 
448 
 
Louisiana Frank‟s Place Successful African-
American 
professional drawn to 
New Orleans by its 
―food, its music, its 
social clubs, its jazzy 
seductiveness‖; a 
―romantic, almost 
dream-like, aura‖ 
New Orleans as a 
colorfully seedy, 
cheerfully boozy, 
free-living city  
suffering from crime, 
illicit sex, drugs, 
violence, corruption; 
modern cities 
surrounded by 
wilderness and 
spooky swamps 
Mississippi In the Heat of the 
Night 
Racial issues; the 
transition from Old 
South to New South; 
conservative values; 
slow pace of life; 
violence and crime; a 
high ―redneck factor‖; 
a tight-knit 
community 
Isolated backwaters  
North Carolina The Andy Griffith 
Show 
Leisurely paced life in 
an ideal small town; a 
―city-slickers idea of 
heaven‖; warm and 
sincere characters; a 
tight-knit community; 
the importance of 
family; escapism; 
simple townsfolk; 
unsophisticated rural 
hillbillies; small-town 
ingenuity  
Modern urban areas 
mixed with small, out-
of-the-way towns; 
gentle warmth; 
nostalgia; tumultuous 
life in a modern small 
town 
South Carolina American Gothic A charming small 
town haunted by a 
dark secret 
 
Tennessee Hee Haw Country music; 
goofball sense of 
humor and 
determinedly 
unsophisticated 
atmosphere; ―idea-
free, pure 
entertainment‖ 
Country variety 
programs; violent, 
impoverished and 
backward small towns 
449 
 
Tennessee 
(continued) 
Nashville Now Country-themed talk 
and variety program 
 
Virginia The Waltons Wholesome rural 
nostalgia; a loving 
family; traditional 
values; bittersweet 
stories; dignity, 
warmth, quiet 
intelligence, and 
simple wisdom; 
splendid isolation  
Bright, motivated 
government 
employees; optimism; 
warm and loving 
families  
American Dad Middle class nuclear 
family; suburban 
conformity; parody of 
neoconservatism and 
right-wing paranoia; 
family values  
West Virginia Hawkins Prestigious lawyer 
living in a small town; 
earnest and intelligent 
country folk 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
450 
 
CHAPTER 6 - THE SOUTH 
 
At first glance, it appears that television has treated the South a little unfairly. It is home 
to over 19% of the country‘s population, but has accounted for just 5.3% of the television 
landscape, and even those numbers are deceiving. Tennessee has accounted for an impressive 
2.54% of the American television landscape, or just under half of the medium‘s southern images. 
Tennessee also has accomplished this with just twenty-five entries, indicating that a number of 
the state‘s programs have enjoyed remarkably long lives. Still, many of those shows were 
country music and variety programs, and the most successful of them aired in syndication or on 
cable television, rather than on the major networks.  
Many southern states have fared very poorly on television. West Virginia and South 
Carolina each count only one entry, and neither lasted more than a year. Kentucky has served as 
the setting for four programs, but they have been similarly short-lived. Alabama, Arkansas, and 
Mississippi have each served as the backdrop for one somewhat successful program. 
Collectively, however, these six states account for just thirteen total programs, which is fewer 
than the total for Kansas alone. These same six states have collectively accounted for 0.54% of 
the television landscape, which is less than the individual mark of Maryland. North Carolina has 
a slightly more impressive history, having served as the setting for seven programs that account 
for 0.39% of the country‘s television images, but that is mostly attributable to one very 
successful show. Virginia has also notched seven television entries, and they have accounted for 
0.47% of the American television landscape, but that is also largely because of the success of a 
single show. Louisiana ranks third in terms of total programs with twelve, but few of these shows 
have lasted long, and its share of the television landscape is equal to that of North Carolina, at 
451 
 
0.39%. Georgia ranks second in the South, totaling sixteen programs, a few of which have been 
fairly durable, and accounts for 0.97% of the country‘s television landscape. Absent Tennessee, 
however, the South has accounted for just 2.76% of the American television landscape, which is 
less than that of the District of Columbia alone. 
 
KENTUCKY 
Kentucky‘s television landscape has been fairly sparse, and that seems at least partially 
due to the state‘s lack of large urban centers. Large metropolitan areas are disproportionately 
represented on the American television landscape, and Louisville, the state‘s largest metro area, 
ranks behind forty-one other American cities in terms of population. The Kentucky of television 
is also not a modern urban one, but rather rooted in the past. None of its four programs have 
survived beyond one season.  
The first entry, The Wonderful John Acton, was set in 1919 in the small town of Ludlow 
on the Ohio River and told the story of a county clerk who lived in the back room of his general 
store. A warm reminiscence of small-town life, this program was similar in spirit to later shows 
such as The Andy Griffith Show and The Waltons, but not nearly as successful, surviving just 
three months in the summer of 1953. Kentucky‘s second entry, Young Dan‟l Boone, was an 
adventure series of about the famous woodsman when he was in his twenties. A sort of 
nineteenth-century backwoods Mod Squad, the show also featured Boone‘s sweetheart, Rebecca, 
and a multicultural trio of sidekicks: a 12-year-old English boy, a Cherokee, and a runaway 
slave. Viewers did not know what to do with the series, and it was cancelled after four weeks in 
1977. Kentucky then was off the air for two decades before returning in 1998 with the short-
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lived soap opera Legacy. Set near Lexington in the 1880s, it was the story of the Logans, a 
wealthy Irish family that owned a horse farm. The patriarch was Ned, a widower who had been 
incapacitated after being shot. His eldest son, Sean, was secretly in love with Marina, the 
family‘s black housekeeper. Clay, the hot-headed younger son added to the mix along with two 
daughters, shy Alice and precocious Lexy. Much of the program‘s tension involved the rural 
Winters clan that was bent on destroying the Logans. Legacy clearly was an attempt to revive the 
spirit of filthy-rich-family soap operas, such Dallas and Dynasty, which had been so popular in 
the 1980s. Big Oil was more interesting than Big Horse, apparently, and the show was cancelled 
after about four months. Kentucky‘s final entry, and only contemporary one, was Cheerleader 
Nation, a documentary series about the squad at Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School in 
Lexington, and their successful quest for a fourth national championship. It aired on the Lifetime 
Network for eight weeks in 2006.       
 
WEST VIRGINIA 
West Virginia‘s lone television entry—1973‘s Hawkins—did for the legal drama what 
The Andy Griffith Show did for the sitcom. At the heart of both shows was the folksy charm of its 
star—on Hawkins it was Hollywood icon Jimmy Stewart—and a similar geographic message. 
Billy Jim Hawkins lived in a small town, but had built a national reputation as an expert on 
murder cases. With his assistant, cousin R. J., he travelled the country clearing his clients and 
helping to apprehend the real culprits. Television historian David Martindale‘s description of 
Hawkins echoes statements made by others about Andy Griffith:    
Perceived by many as just some local yokel—a slow-talking 
country lawyer with an equally slow wit—he was in fact a crafty 
criminal defense attorney, one so sharp he could have given Perry 
453 
 
Mason a run for his money . . . . He was a hard man not to 
admire—and impossible not to like . . . . Hawkins‘ forthrightness 
and earnestness was continually played against the seediness of the 
series‘ guest characters (Martindale 1991: 225). 
 
The difference between Hawkins and Andy Griffith, of course, was longevity. Hawkins 
lasted the duration of the 1973-1974 season, but was part of a rotating line-up with CBS Tuesday 
Night Movies and, of all things, Shaft, so only nine episodes of the show aired.   
 
TENNESSEE 
Although a few southern states can boast entries that were more enduringly popular than 
any of Tennessee‘s programs—North Carolina‘s The Andy Griffith Show and Virginia‘s The 
Waltons, for example—no other southern state‘s television landscape can match Tennessee in 
terms of sheer quantity. The Volunteer State has served as the backdrop for twenty-five 
programs, which is nine more than its closest regional counterpart, Georgia; more than double 
that of Louisiana; and greater than the total entries for Kentucky, West Virginia, Arkansas, North 
Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi combined. This large volume is mostly 
attributable to primetime programming that originated from Nashville, the heart of the nation‘s 
country music industry. After the demise of national broadcasting from such cities as 
Philadelphia and Chicago in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Nashville remained one of the few 
places outside New York and California to produce primetime television programs. Nearly all of 
them had a country flavor.  
Tennessee‘s first national television program originated from the Mother Church of 
country music, the Grand Ole Opry. A performance at the venerable Nashville theater had long 
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been considered the pinnacle of any country musician‘s career, and live shows from the venue 
had been broadcast on national radio since 1925. The Grand Ole Opry finally arrived on network 
television in October 1955, when ABC aired hour-long simulcasts of the radio program once a 
month. Oddly, despite featuring some of country music‘s icons, including Ernest Tubb, Hank 
Snow, Chet Atkins, Marty Robbins, Roy Acuff, and June Carter, the ABC broadcast did not last 
as long as ―lesser‖ country music entries such as Springfield, Missouri‘s Ozark Jubilee or 
Cincinnati‘s Midwestern Hayride. ABC pulled the plug on the show in September 1956, ending 
primetime television‘s flirtation with Nashville for more than a decade, and setting the stage for 
the national networks‘ rather stormy relationship with the city‘s music industry.      
Nashville‘s second entry, The Johnny Cash Show, premiered on ABC in the summer of 
1969. Many of its performers were also from the country music field, including Cash himself, the 
Carter Family, and the Statler Brothers, but the show also showcased talent spanning the musical 
spectrum, including such guests as Louis Armstrong, Eric Clapton, Arlo Guthrie, Jose Feliciano, 
Pete Seeger, and James Taylor. Eight days after the debut of Johnny Cash, CBS rolled out its 
own Nashville-based variety program, which, unlike Johnny Cash, was purely, unabashedly, 
and, some argued, offensively country-fried. The almost mythical story of Hee Haw‘s origin was 
related by television insider Bob Shanks in his 1976 memoir The Cool Fire:  
One friend of mine, Bernie Brillstein, an intelligent and jolly talent 
manager and producer, had tried for months to sell a prestige series 
he believed in. Zero. He was getting absolutely nowhere . . . . In 
frustration, he grabbed up a copy of Variety to see what the hell 
was selling. In the top ten shows he saw Beverly Hillbillies, Green 
Acres, Glen Campbell, and Laugh-In. Consciously, maliciously 
almost, he sat down and grafted all of these programs onto his one 
giant nerve end of frustration. When he had it, he called CBS . . . 
got an appointment, and in two minutes, sold the show (Shanks 
1976: 153). 
455 
 
 
The most substantial difference between The Johnny Cash Show and Hee Haw was the 
goofball sense of humor and determinedly unsophisticated atmosphere of the latter. Sprinkled in 
with the serious musical numbers were songs with titles like ―Who‘s Gonna Mow Your Grass?,‖ 
―Your Squaw‘s On the Warpath,‖ and ―Hobo Meditations.‖ The setting for the show was 
Kornfield Kounty, a place that, in the words of one historian, ―made Hooterville look like Times 
Square‖ (Hollis 2008: 221). The male comedians usually dressed in overalls, while voluptuous 
female comics were usually poured into skimpy outfits inspired by Daisy Mae Scragg of Al 
Capp‘s L‟il Abner comic strip. Like Laugh-In, there was a rapid-fire succession of one-liners, 
blackouts, and sketches, but instead of the jokes being delivered from the windows of a 
psychedelic ―joke wall,‖ or from a hipster cocktail party, Hee Haw‘s were delivered by actors 
lounging about in rocking chairs, on haystacks, or in a cornfield. And while bad jokes on Laugh-
In merited a bucket of water, those telling duds on Hee Haw were smacked on the head with a 
rubber chicken or on the backside with a fence plank.  
 Like the show‘s jokes, most of the comedians on Hee Haw were industry veterans, 
including Opry mainstays Grandpa Jones, Minnie Pearl, Stringbean Akeman, and Archie 
Campbell; Petticoat Junction veterans Gunilla Hutton and Jeannine Riley; and George Lindsay, 
who brought the character of Goober Pyle intact from The Andy Griffith Show. Then there was 
Kornfield Kounty‘s resident idiot, Alvin ―Junior‖ Samples. Samples, an obese, slow-talking, 
good-ole boy from Cumming, Georgia, had been working at a sawmill when copies of him 
spinning a wild fishing yarn began making rounds at country music stations. This recording, 
entitled World‟s Biggest Whopper, made him a minor celebrity in country circles, and he was a 
natural fit for Hee Haw‘s style of humor.       
456 
 
If the gags on Hee Haw were considered by many to be cut-rate, the production was not. 
The show was performed in the studios of Nashville‘s WTVF, which sent nearly seventy miles 
of videotape to Los Angeles each season, where the Leviathan task of editing the show was 
performed. While the tone of the show was laconic, its pace was frenetic. Whereas a typical 
variety show contained about twenty distinct segments, an average episode of Hee Haw had 
nearly 150. More important, the show‘s musical talent was no laughing matter. Like The Johnny 
Cash Show, Hee Haw‘s musical guests included some of the legends of country music: Merle 
Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Lee Lewis, Loretta Lynn, Charley Pride, and Conway Twitty. 
Moreover, the show was hosted by Roy Clark and Buck Owens, both top-notch country 
musicians in their own right. 
 Despite the show‘s impressive array of musical talent, television critics were, almost 
without exception, absolutely horrified by Hee Haw. The show was described as ―tripe,‖ 
―degrading,‖ ―vile,‖ and ―awful,‖ with one critic claiming that ―CBS ought to be ashamed.‖ TV 
Guide‘s Cleveland Amory called the show ―Outhouse Laugh-In,‖ the Houston Chronicle‘s Ann 
Hodges wrote that it was ―possibly the worst show I‘ve ever seen,‖ and Cecil Smith of the Los 
Angeles Times described Hee Haw as ―the most irrelevant, stupid and ghastly program in recent 
history‖ (Andrews 1980: 46, 51).  
 For some, Hee Haw was not simply an artistic abomination, but a political and cultural 
one as well. James Branscome, the director of the strip-mining watchdog group Save Our 
Kentucky, believed that CBS, which aired The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Hee Haw 
consecutively on Tuesday nights in 1970, was being every bit as exploitive and destructive as the 
coal industry. He called the network‘s action ―the most effective effort ever exerted by a nation 
to belittle, demean, and otherwise destroy a minority people within its boundaries.‖ Had another 
457 
 
minority group been portrayed in a similar manner, he added, it would have provoked ―an 
immediate public outcry‖ (Harkins 2004: 203). Part of the critical backlash directed at Hee Haw 
likely stemmed from the show‘s origin as a replacement for the politically irreverent, and 
recently cancelled, CBS variety show The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. One TV Guide 
critic, for example, was disgusted that Hee Haw had ―come to life over the dead bodies of the 
Smothers Brothers, who were always making those terrific jokes about racial tensions, the 
Vietnam War, Congressional ethics, air pollution, and the military-industrial complex‖ (Hollis 
2008: 224).         
  Hee Haw‘s rise to prominence during one of the most politically and economically 
turbulent eras in recent history troubled or even baffled some critics. But at least one believed the 
show‘s popularity was actually a product of its times. Neil Hickey described Hee Haw as a 
―rapid rural romp of retrogressive rejoinders distilled into idea-free, pure entertainment for 
America‘s tired brain‖ (Andrews 1980: 44). Hee Haw cohost Buck Owens seemed to agree, 
commenting that: ―We try to entertain all ages. We‘re not a hip show. We stay away from inside 
jokes as much as possible . . . . Anybody can grasp this material‖ (Andrews 1980: 50). 
If nothing else, Hee Haw was a ratings success. The program was ranked twentieth in the 
Nielsen rating in its rookie year, and climbed to number sixteen the next season. The Johnny 
Cash Show was similarly popular. After beginning life as a summer replacement program in 
1969, it ranked fifteenth on the Nielsen charts for the 1969-1970 season. Both shows, however, 
were gone in 1971. This was not a result of declining ratings, but rather part of a corporate 
decision now commonly referred to as television‘s ―rural purge.‖ In the late 1960s, CBS had 
enjoyed enormous hits with a number of rural-themed comedies and variety shows, including 
Gomer Pyle, U. S. M. C., Mayberry, R. F. D., The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Hee Haw, 
458 
 
The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, and The Jim Nabors Hour (which featured the star of 
Gomer Pyle and debuted shortly after that show‘s departure). It also had a stable of veteran 
programs with strong audiences among rural, small-town, and older viewers, including The Red 
Skelton Hour, The Ed Sullivan Show, My Three Sons, and Family Affair. ABC was less reliant on 
such programming, but it did count The Johnny Cash Show and The Lawrence Welk Show among 
its more dependable programs. At the conclusion of the 1970-1971 season, eleven of these 
thirteen programs were cancelled, and by the end of the next year, all of them were gone.      
Although CBS is the network most often cited as responsible for the purge, it was 
actually NBC that precipitated it. Long mired in second place behind the ―Tiffany Network,‖ 
NBC took the novel, even revolutionary approach of sharing its demographic research with 
advertisers. NBC persuaded potential customers that its programming—shows like Laugh-In, 
Julia, The Flip Wilson Show, and Adam-12—appealed to a younger, more urban audience that 
was more susceptible to advertising. The programs on CBS, they contended, attracted older, 
small-town and rural viewers; those who consumed less and were more likely to buy the same 
products they had always purchased. When NBC‘s marketing strategy worked, this fact did not 
go unnoticed at CBS: 
New CBS president Bob Wood . . . realized that the network was 
faring poorly with most big city viewers and saw that the audience 
for the network‘s rural-based shows was now composed almost 
exclusively of children, the elderly, older blue-collar workers, and 
folks in rural and small-town locales—all told, the least desirable 
viewer demographics for attracting advertisers . . . . According to a 
perhaps apocryphal story Buddy Ebsen recounted years later, 
network head William Paley‘s wife was greeted by her friends at a 
posh New York restaurant as ―the wife of the owner of the hillbilly 
network.‖ Thus, with Paley‘s full backing, Wood made a move 
beginning in the spring of 1970 to purge every rural-based program 
from the CBS lineup. As Green Acres‘s regular Pat Buttram 
lamented: ―they cancelled everything with a tree—including 
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Lassie.‖ By 1971, CBS had made the ―turn toward relevance‖ and 
was broadcasting programs featuring young people with ―sixties 
values‖ such as All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, 
and, a year later, M*A*S*H (Harkins 2007: 201-203).  
   
Despite the purge, Kornfield Kounty refused to die. New episodes of Hee Haw were 
produced and released in syndication and, although its success continued to baffle critics, the 
program continued off the networks for two more decades. Hee Haw‘s popularity inspired two 
more long-running syndicated country music programs in the early 1970s, both originating from 
Opryland, U. S. A., in Nashville. That Good Ole Nashville Music was in production from 1970 to 
1985, and Pop! Goes the Country ran from 1974 to 1982. Two shorter-lived syndicated Nashville 
music programs also aired in 1976: twenty-six episodes of Opryland‘s Music Hall America and 
fifty-two episodes of Dolly, hosted by emerging country star Dolly Parton.  
NBC aired a knock-off of Hee Haw, called The Nashville Palace, during the 1981-1982 
season, but the major networks mostly ignored the obvious appetite for country-themed 
programs. Outsiders attempted to fill that void on March 7, 1983, by launching The Nashville 
Network (TNN) on cable television. The new network‘s daytime line-up consisted mainly of 
hunting, fishing, and racing programs, but its evening schedule was almost all country music. 
The cornerstone was Nashville Now, a live, nightly talk and variety show hosted by Ralph 
Emery. Brooks and Marsh record that ―everybody who was anybody in country music showed 
up here, making the show almost as much of an institution in Nashville as the Grand Ole Opry 
itself‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 962). Another early regular series was You Can Be a Star, a 
talent contest for amateur country acts that ran from 1983 to 1989, and again during the 1991-
1992 season. Gospel Jubilee, TNN‘s southern gospel entry from Opryland, aired during the 
1990-1991 season. Crook and Chase, a down-home country music talk show premiered in 1986. 
460 
 
In 1993, upon the retirement of Ralph Emery and Nashville Now, Crook and Chase was 
expanded and retitled Music City Tonight, running until 1996.  
Another popular TNN program, Club Dance, was the network‘s answer to American 
Bandstand and Dance Fever. Originating from Knoxville, the show was hosted by Shelly 
Mangrum and ―fatherly Phil Campbell, the soda-pop bartender‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 263). 
Cashing in on the country line-dancing fad, and featuring professional, amateur, young, and old 
dancers alike, Club Dance aired from 1991 to 1999, producing a remarkable 1,848 episodes. The 
Statler Brothers Show, which premiered in the fall of 1991, was a throwback to the days of Ed 
Sullivan. It featured the title group and other country acts, plus a wide range of comedians, 
jugglers, ventriloquists, and magicians. This show, despite its dusty format, became the biggest 
hit on TNN and prompted the network to launch a second variety program, Prime Time Country, 
in 1996. Both programs lasted until 1999. 
The seemingly antiquated nature of TNN shows prompted one critic to quip, ―Vaudeville 
never died, it just moved to Nashville‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 1304). If there is a central 
geographic message indicated by the success of such programming, it is that a large portion of 
America‘s television audience had been alienated by the rural purge of 1971. In fact, Hee Haw‘s 
long syndicated run and the very existence of TNN suggests a rejection, among some viewers, of 
all things hip and urban. At the very least, this programming certainly created for the television 
audience a lasting image of Tennessee as the home for all things down-home.       
In 1997, TNN‘s Nashville-based owners sold the network to the Westinghouse 
Corporation, which then purchased, of all things, CBS, putting that network‘s executives in 
charge of TNN. As if it were settling an old score, CBS immediately dropped TNN‘s guitar logo 
461 
 
and began a Shermanesque campaign to replace TNN‘s country music and rural lifestyle 
programs with general interest movies and reruns. In April of 2000, Viacom, the owner of MTV, 
purchased CBS and completed the transition. The Nashville Network‘s name was changed first 
to ―The National Network,‖ and then, in 2003, to ―Spike TV.‖ It now featured testosterone-
soaked programs oriented toward young males.  
With the lid of TNN‘s coffin finally nailed shut, the number of nationally broadcast 
country programs dwindled significantly, although the country variety format was revived with 
some success from 2003 through 2008. Nashville Star was the USA Network‘s answer to 
American Idol, with amateur country musicians competing for a record contract, with the finals 
taking place at Opryland. 
In contrast to its long-running and successful array of country music variety programs, 
Tennessee has served as the backdrop to just seven scripted programs, only one of which lasted 
more than a year. Four of these programs still had a musical flair, including the first, a 1977 
crime drama called Nashville 99 that featured Claude Akins as a veteran cop. Country music star 
Jerry Reed played his sidekick, and other country musicians often appeared as themselves. The 
show was not well-received, with one critic sarcastically calling it ―absolutely the finest police 
series ever filmed on location in Nashville using country western singers as guest stars‖ (Collins 
1988: 119). Audiences didn‘t think much of it either, and Nashville 99 was off-duty after just 
four weeks. The sitcom Hee Haw Honeys premiered in 1978 and aired for twenty-six weeks. 
This syndicated program featured five members the Hee Haw cast playing the role of operators 
of a Nashville night club. It was a thinly veiled variety show, and not terribly different from its 
parent program, featuring cornball humor and country music performances.  
462 
 
Boone, a drama chronicling the life of a young singer, debuted in 1983. Set in 1953 in the 
small town of Trinity, near Nashville, Boone was the story of Boone Sawyer, whose life bore 
more than a passing resemblance to that of Elvis Presley. Boone wanted to be a rockabilly star—
something that neither the Grand Ole Opry nor his parents (who wanted him to be a minister)—
were ready for. Boone‘s best friends were Rome Hawley, a motorcycle thug, and Mr. Johnson, a 
blind blues musician. The show was not especially successful, lasting just eleven months. Oddly 
enough, neither was a series based on the real deal in 1990. Elvis, which was filmed on location 
in Memphis, was a series of vignettes chronicling the rock god‘s life before stardom.     
Only three Tennessee-based programs have strayed from the country music theme, and 
none of them painted a particularly appealing portrait of the Volunteer State. The drama Walking 
Tall, the story of rural sheriff, ran for five months in 1981. This program was based on the movie 
series of the same name which, in turn, was based on the real life of Buford Pusser, the sheriff of 
rural McNeal County. Pusser had taken on illegal gambling and prostitution in his county, using 
a four-foot-long club he called ―The Pacifier‖ to keep scofflaws in line. The sitcom Filthy Rich 
aired during the 1982-1983 season. A spoof of Dynasty and Dallas, the program was about the 
family of Big Guy Beck, a land baron who, before dying and being cryogenically frozen, 
recorded a long video will. Each week a new section of the will was played for the family, who 
ranged from arrogant aristocrat to lowly rube, and who were forced to conform to Big Guy‘s odd 
demands. Tennessee‘s last scripted entry to date was Christy, a historical drama, which 
premiered in 1994 and aired for sixteen months. Set in rural Cutter Gap in 1912, Christy told the 
story of the spirited nineteen-year-old title character who had left a comfortable life to teach at a 
missionary school. Life in Cutter Gap was harsh, with blood feuds among local families, and an 
463 
 
impoverished, mostly illiterate population who resented education and the ―more civilized 
lifestyle‖ that Christy represented (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 253).             
 
ARKANSAS 
Arkansas has been the setting for three television programs, with the first and most 
successful making its debut in 1990. Set in a small town of the same name, the sitcom Evening 
Shade featured Burt Reynolds as Wood Newton, who had been a star high school running back 
for the Evening Shade Mules. After a successful college and pro career, Wood returned home to 
coach the Mules, who were in the midst of a fifty-seven game losing streak. Hanging out with 
Wood at the Barbecue Villa were his wife Ava, the town‘s prosecuting attorney; her 
curmudgeonly father, Evan Evans; and tart Aunt Frieda Evans. Also seen were the town stripper, 
a cranky doctor, a wimpy math teacher, and the three Newton children. 
Evening Shade had a somewhat brief, but successful run, ranking in the Nielsen top 
twenty during the second and third of its four seasons. This success may have been propelled by 
a certain air of authenticity. Even though Evening Shade did trot out a few familiar southern 
characters (Evan and Frieda appeared to have strolled right out of a Tennessee Williams play) 
and portrayed the town as tradition-bound, the show nevertheless largely avoided blatantly 
pejorative southern stereotypes. It actually became a favorite of the critics. Los Angeles Times 
critic Howard Rosenberg, for example, wrote that Evening Shade had ―roots, character and lusty 
wit:‖  
Besides being very funny, this series from Harry Thomason and 
Linda Bloodworth-Thomason (Designing Women) has an 
appealingly distinct tone and an honesty in its relationships that 
464 
 
dramatically set it apart from most TV comedies. The characters 
are richly eccentric, the writing sexy and tartly Southern and the 
performances excellent (Rosenberg 1990: 1). 
 
Although it does not have a football team, Evening Shade, Arkansas, really exists, a town 
of about four hundred in the northeastern part of the state. Chosen by series coproducer and 
Arkansas native Harry Thomason simply because ―it has a wonderful sound,‖ shots of the town 
were used in the show‘s credits and in some establishing shots, with other exteriors filmed in 
Little Rock and Fayetteville (Golden 1996: 100). The people of Evening Shade apparently had 
no problems with the show, and actually invited Burt Reynolds to deliver the keynote address at 
the town‘s high school commencement, which he did in 1991.  
Arkansas‘s other two programs were of the unscripted variety, including 2002‘s ICU: 
Arkansas Children‟s Hospital, a short-lived documentary series chronicling the work of pediatric 
cardiologists in Little Rock. The subject matter of the state‘s third entry was not nearly as grim, 
but, to some, far more horrifying. In 2003, the first installment of the reality series The Simple 
Life stranded wealthy, self-indulgent, California party girls Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton in tiny 
Altus, Arkansas, sans credit cards and cell phones. They lived on the farm of the Leding family, 
who patiently endured the girls‘ pettiness, materialism, and, to put it politely, lack of sexual 
restraint. To raise funds, the girls were forced to work at a fast-food restaurant, for a cattle 
auctioneer, and on chicken and dairy farms. They also spent time getting drunk at a local pub and 
dance club, organizing the Altus Springtime Gala, and getting to know the customs of the locals.  
In essence, The Simple Life was The Beverly Hillbillies thrown in reverse, and it raised 
the same fundamental geographic question—who, exactly, were viewers supposed to be laughing 
465 
 
at—the simple folks of Altus, or the spoiled brats from California? Critic Terry Sawyer took the 
latter view: 
Democrats would do well to tape this show as evidence for any 
future hearings about the estate tax, as suffering is here doled out 
where suffering is due. If anyone should find herself on the ass end 
of the boob tube, it should be the fake-n-bake party heiress whose 
most recent barnacle on the hull of proper fame was a grainy 
private porno featuring a sleazy former boyfriend . . . . Nicole 
Richie and Paris Hilton have no discernible talents (I haven't seen 
the video) and personalities as pleasant as a bout of dry heaving     
. . . . The Simple Life introduces the girls during a ―typical‖ day: 
they spend thousands of dollars without seeming to think. (Hilton 
walks into one store to spend $1,500 on a bag for her dog, 
confident that mommy‘s credit card is on file.) It was, in fact, a 
cagey opening gambit: after watching these coddled vipers giddily 
stuff their voids, I was eager to see the wealth teat ripped from 
their mouths. For them, it‘s a kind of punishment; as one of 
Hilton‘s friends observes, ―I‘d rather have no food for six weeks 
than no cell phone‖ (Sawyer 2003: 1).   
 
Critic Ken Tucker did not buy Sawyer‘s argument, but rather saw The Simple Life as one in a 
long line of programs where the wealthy and entitled tread upon the meek, never learning a 
single lesson: 
It started out . . . as a concept that would level the Green Acres 
playing field: Socialite brats Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, 
separated from their cash and credit cards . . . were dispatched to 
rural America, there to be shaken out of their pampered 
complacency by ordinary folks unimpressed with the pair‘s 
notoriety . . . . Well, turns out the series devolved into a weekly 
half hour that could have been called Let‟s Sneer at the Hicks. 
Paris and Nicole imposed their condescending rudeness and sense 
of privilege on everyone they met (Tucker 2005: 60). 
 
 
466 
 
NORTH CAROLINA 
Prior to 1960, only four programs had been set in the American South. Tennessee‘s 
Grand Ole Opry, as just discussed, was joined by The Adventures of Jim Bowie and Yancy 
Derringer, both based in Louisiana and essentially southern variations on the western. The only 
scripted program set in the contemporary region had been the Louisiana detective drama 
Bourbon Street Beat, which lasted just one season. All of this made the 1960 debut of North 
Carolina‘s The Andy Griffith Show a truly transformative event for television geography. It was 
North Carolina‘s first show, the South‘s first sitcom, and the first program set in the region to 
gain widespread popularity. More than four decades after its departure, it not only must be 
considered the most popular television program set in the South, but also warrants consideration 
for being the most enduringly popular show in the history of the medium. 
Part of the show‘s appeal—a large part, it appears—was its simple, homespun, gimmick-
free nature. Griffith played Andy Taylor, a widower who was the sheriff of a small North 
Carolina town called Mayberry. Andy‘s deputy was his cousin, Barney Fife, a loyal sidekick and 
good friend, and easily the most hyperactively hapless lawman in television history. Much of the 
action took place at the town‘s combination sheriff‘s office, courthouse, and jail, but Andy 
Griffith rarely functioned as a bona fide police show, since so little real crime ever happened in 
Mayberry. Most of the episodes revolved around Andy‘s relationship with his young son Opie, 
Andy and Barney‘s relationships with their girlfriends, and the relationships among the citizens 
of Mayberry and the surrounding area.              
Despite the show‘s slow-moving simplicity, or perhaps because of it, The Andy Griffith 
Show was immediately popular. It ranked fourth on the Nielsen charts during its rookie season, 
467 
 
and never placed lower than seventh during its eight-year run. When Griffith decided to call it 
quits at the conclusion of the 1967-1968 season, his show had become the highest-rated program 
on television, and it went on to have an incredibly successful afterlife in rerun syndication. Andy 
Griffith has never really left the air, appearing daily, often more than once, on cable networks 
and local stations throughout the country. A 1986 made-for-TV reunion movie, Return to 
Mayberry, was the highest rated telefilm of that season. A stunning array of books have been 
published regarding the show, from scholarly works to cookbooks based on Aunt Bee‘s dishes, 
and the Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club counts more than 1,300 chapters from North 
Carolina to Australia to Saudi Arabia to Germany.    
Much of the show‘s enduring popularity is attributable to the show‘s writers, producers, 
and especially its stars—Don Knotts alone recieved five Emmy awards for his portrayal of 
Barney Fife—but this statement can be made for a number of successful series. All in the Family, 
for example, received more awards and had much higher ratings during its original run than did 
The Andy Griffith Show, but it does not enjoy the same sort of cult-like following today. The 
indestructibility of Andy Griffith is, as noted by media historian Tim Hollis, almost mysterious: 
Reams of paper have been used to write about The Andy Griffith 
Show from every conceivable angle. It has been analyzed, 
dissected, tested, sliced and diced, and still no one can seem to 
pinpoint just why it was such a hit in its own day and quite 
probably even more popular among television audiences today. 
The high quality of the writing and acting certainly had much to do 
with it, but that still does not explain TV buffs‘ almost fanatical 
adulation of the program (Hollis 2008: 177-178). 
 
While no single factor can explain this mystery, the leading candidate is its setting. Many 
of Andy Griffith‘s sitcom contemporaries were also set in fictional cities and towns, but most of 
468 
 
these backdrops were a sort of vaguely defined ―Anytown, U. S. A, ‖ such as the Hillsdale of 
Dennis the Menace, Bryant Park of My Three Sons, Hilldale of The Donna Reed Show, 
Springfield of Father Knows Best, and Mayfield of Leave it Beaver. None of these locales left 
the same sort of impression—or, to use the geographer‘s terminology, created the same sense of 
place—as did the little town of 1,200 in the hill country of North Carolina. 
Each week, the essence of life in Mayberry was on display for viewers in the Andy 
Griffith‘s opening credits. Andy and Opie, fishing poles in hand, walked along a brightly lit 
country lane as the show‘s theme song—a whistled version of the tune ―Gone Fishin‘‖—played 
in the background. As they came to the shore of Myer‘s Lake, Andy paused as Opie picked up a 
rock and threw it into the water, and then the two went on their unhurried way. ―In 30 seconds, 
that opening,‖ wrote critic Sam Frank, ―underscored the show‘s main relationship while 
signaling to millions that it was relax-and-enjoy-yourself time (Frank 1999: 134).     
The show‘s leisurely pace and idealized sense of place are most often cited by historians 
and critics as being central to the show‘s appeal. As noted by television historian Richard Kelly, 
―No show in the history of television . . . has so successfully mastered the art of nostalgia and 
created an imaginative role model of an ideal society as The Andy Griffith Show‖ (Kelly 1987: 
41). Critic John Javna described Mayberry as being ―a picture postcard of a small southern Main 
Street, a slice of steaming apple pie, a little bit of Bret Harte come to life (Javna 1988: 146). Ed 
Bark, writing for the Dallas Morning News, went so far as to suggest that the Andy Griffith‘s 
sense of place was more important to the success of the show than were the laughs:   
Not too many people found it hilariously funny . . . . It‘s more of a 
warm show—maybe the first warm-edy—just a pleasant half hour 
to watch. I didn‘t roll over laughing over Andy Griffith, but I 
always felt good after watching an episode of it. It‘s a kind of 
469 
 
small town America that will never find its way back into prime 
time, but you can tell . . . that people still feel affection for the 
place (Javna 1988: 47).  
 
A common theme in critical assessments of the show‘s enduring popularity is a longing, 
on the part of the viewer, for a bygone era. As critic Leigh H. Edwards put it, The Andy Griffith 
Show ―captures America‘s yearning for lost innocence, for small-town safety and community,‖ 
but it is worth noting that this yearning was also important to the show‘s initial success (Edwards 
2005b: 1). In Mayberry, there was no civil unrest, race riots, emerging counterculture, student 
demonstrations, Kennedy assassination, or Vietnam War. According to historian Anthony 
Harkins, the most striking break that Andy Griffith made from the real world was Mayberry‘s 
relationship to the American South of the 1960s:  
[Andy Griffith] presented positive portrayals of southern small-
town life and rural folk that explicitly offset news coverage that 
consistently presented real-life southerners as villains. As a nearly 
pacifist small-town sheriff who refuses to wear a gun and who 
forces his trigger-happy deputy to keep his single bullet for his 
own revolver in his shirt pocket, Andy Griffith‘s character offered 
a studied contrast to racist violent southern sheriffs such as Jim 
Clark of Selma, Alabama, and ―Bull‖ Connor of Birmingham, who 
were widely portrayed in early 1960s news media as the 
personification of southern white ―massive resistance‖ to the Civil 
Rights movement (Harkins 2004: 197). 
 
There is no denying that Mayberry was something of a fantasy land. It was not only a 
departure from the reality of 1960s America, but also an escape from the hard realities of life in 
any time and place. In Mayberry, as noted by Richard Kelly, there was no ―violence, serious 
disease, believable death, hatred, lust, or any of the other ills of most societies‖ (Kelly 1987: 42).  
470 
 
It would be unfair, however, to characterize The Andy Griffith Show as pure treacle. What the 
show lacked in socially relevant plots and weighty themes, it made up for in complex characters. 
Critic Ken Tucker argued that ―the genius of this gentle sitcom was the way its fantasy surface—
placid life in the never-world of Mayberry, North Carolina—belied the realistic emotions roiling 
inside every character‖ (Tucker 2005: 96). To put it another way, while the Andy Griffith Show 
avoided some of the basic realities of its time and place, the characters and the town they 
inhabited seemed thoroughly real. Andy Taylor was, without doubt, a great dad and a great 
sheriff, but unlike many of his omniscient, infallible television counterparts in both occupations, 
he made mistakes along the way. Likewise, unlike the protagonists of Leave it to Beaver or 
Dennis the Menace, Opie was neither a blank slate nor a precocious hellion, but a sensitive, 
thoughtful kid who learned that life‘s lessons were not always simple, and who often questioned 
the moral relativity of the adult world around him. And then there was Barney, whose officious 
bluster made him, more often than not, the butt of nearly every joke in Mayberry. Behind that 
thin lawman veneer, however, was a bubbling mass of insecurities that made him an immensely 
likable character, one who nobody in Mayberry or the viewing audience really wanted to see get 
hurt. In that regard, he was a sort of antagonistic protagonist, and a very different comic foil than 
existed on most other television sitcoms.  
Perhaps the most revolutionary thing about Andy Griffith was the degree to which it 
developed its own geography. Leading the way for later television towns like Northern 
Exposure‘s Cicely and The Simpsons‘s Springfield, the secondary characters were rarely one-
dimensional, one-shot figures who passed through an episode simply to move the plot along, but 
fully developed, recurring characters who were integral in shaping Mayberry‘s sense of place. 
There was Andy‘s Aunt Bee, who served as a housekeeper and as something of a foster mother 
471 
 
for both of the Taylor boys. On the rare occasion that the Mayberry jail had a long-term 
occupant, they could count on Aunt Bee bringing a home-cooked meal right to their cell. The 
most frequent short-term occupant was Otis Campbell, the amiable, unrepentant town drunk. 
Otis checked in every Saturday night to sleep it off, and would let himself out the next morning, 
using the key that hung on a hook next to his personal cell. Working down at Wally‘s Garage 
was Gomer Pyle, a good-natured rube who set the standard for later, similar characters such as 
Woody Boyd and Radar O‘Reilly. Like his cousin, Goober, Gomer was so completely ingenuous 
that he made Barney look worldly. Another Mayberry mainstay was the slow-moving, kindly 
barber, Floyd Lawson, who while not dreaming of opening a three-chair shop in Mount Pilot, 
was busy mistakenly attributing all manner of famous quotes and sayings to Calvin Coolidge. 
Also seen were Ellie Walker, the town pharmacist and Andy‘s love interest in early episodes; 
Clara Edwards, Bee‘s fussy friend; Helen Crump, Opie‘s teacher and Andy‘s later love interest; 
Thelma Lou, Barney‘s long-suffering girlfriend; and scores of other recurring characters who 
helped flesh out the Mayberry universe.       
At the center of that universe, of course, was Andy Taylor. As mentioned, in an era when 
southerners, particularly southern lawmen, were often the featured villains on the evening news, 
the region‘s inhabitants could not have found a more likable fictional character to repair their 
tattered image each week on television. Although he was not flawless, and certainly not urbane, 
he was sagacious, friendly, and respectable. In the words of critic Michael Douglas, Andy Taylor 
was ―a bright humanist with a badge who enforces the law by bringing out the best in 
everybody‖ (Javna 1988: 46).  
Andy was a World War II veteran, an expert woodsman and, in the tradition of To Kill a 
Mockingbird‘s Atticus Finch, a man who didn‘t much care for guns, despite being a crack shot. 
472 
 
As mentioned, he usually refused to carry a weapon because he didn‘t want to earn respect by 
threat of violence. Instead, he resolved Mayberry‘s frequent minor crises through diplomacy, 
drawing on his gift for storytelling to give townspeople the means to solve their own problems. 
As noted by Richmond Times Dispatch television critic Douglas Durden:       
One of the attractions was that Andy was so nice all the time. So 
understanding. And he could solve problems without being too 
intrusive. He controlled everything but never imposed himself on a 
situation. He never made the characters feel that he was controlling 
everything. His relationship with Mayberry was like a fantasy of 
what a perfect father should be (Javna 1988: 47).  
 
While Andy was not protecting Mayberry‘s citizens from themselves, he was warding off 
unscrupulous city-slickers who passed through the town and saw it as an easy mark. Unlike the 
Clampetts of The Beverly Hillbillies, who unwittingly undid would-be predators with their own 
naïveté, Andy was no bumpkin. In one episode, for example, a pair of bank robbers cracked the 
vault of the Mayberry bank, only to find Andy waiting calmly inside. The combination, it 
seemed, had been lost years ago, necessitating the installation of a back door. Andy thanked 
them for finally getting the vault open before hauling them off to the jail. In this way, Andy was 
something of a small-town version of Lt. Columbo, a cunning crime fighter who was constantly 
being underestimated by his adversaries. 
As often as not, the city-slickers who passed through Mayberry were victims of their own 
arrogance. Mayberry was first introduced to the television world on an episode of The Danny 
Thomas Show, in which Danny, while passing through the little town, was pulled over by Andy 
Taylor for running a stop sign. Danny, believing he was being shaken down by a crooked small-
town cop, demanded to see the Justice of the Peace who, as it turned out, was also Andy Taylor. 
473 
 
Danny was found guilty, refused to pay the fine, and was locked up in a cell. Over the course of 
the episode, Danny came to respect Andy and, in the end, agreed to pay the fine. That basic 
plot—where an insolent out-of-towner is undone by the folksy wisdom of Andy and eventually 
sees the error of his or her ways—was used time and again, and underscored one of the show‘s 
fundamental geographic themes. That theme was that small towns were nothing to sneer at, and 
that city folks needed to be reminded, from time to time, that sophistication and wisdom are not 
the same thing. 
The Andy Griffith Show was, without doubt, a ringing endorsement of small-town life. It 
provided a contrast to other depictions of small towns, exemplified by the Sinclair Lewis novel 
Main Street, in which local residents were belittled for not realizing just how pathetic their little 
town really was. It is notable that Barney Fife was the one person in Mayberry who constantly 
resented the town‘s small stature. He modeled himself after the hard-bitten, glamorous urban 
crime fighters he saw in the movies, called his gun ―baby,‖ and prayed for a major crime or some 
other calamity to befall Mayberry. And, on those rare occasions when the little town offered him 
a chance to be a real lawman, he always screwed up. When he wasn‘t nearly shooting himself in 
the foot with his one bullet or accidentally locking himself in a jail cell, he was arresting the 
wrong person or frenetically overreacting to a minor event, as in the episode when he put almost 
the entire town in jail. In one way or another, the viewer was constantly reminded that Barney 
would be much better off if, like Andy, he simply accepted and embraced the nature of his little 
town, rather than rejecting it.  
Another important geographic element of the program was its treatment of the folk who 
populated the hills around Mayberry. While Andy Griffith was a show that ―generally celebrated 
the simple pleasures and tribulations of small-town life,‖ it did utilize some common, and often 
474 
 
negative, ―hillbilly‖ stereotypes (Harkins 2004: 181). Seen most often during the show‘s first 
four years, these hillbillies were mostly portrayed as simple-minded country people who took 
cash for supplying the town with illegal moonshine, but who otherwise rejected modern life, as 
in an episode where farmer Rafe Hollister refused to be given a tetanus shot. At worst, they were 
portrayed as ―incompetently violent rubes,‖ who engaged in senseless family feuds precipitated 
by some long-forgotten incident (Harkins 2004: 182). Among the more frequent characters seen 
crawling out of this anachronistic world were Briscoe Darling and his family. According to 
Harkins, the Darlings were a mixture of negative and positive hillbilly stereotypes, walking a 
fine line between parody and authenticity:  
Briscoe Darling . . . and his family represent the footloose musical 
mountaineer . . . . Symbols of an outmoded but authentic mountain 
culture, the Darlings are superstitious, undereducated, slow-talking 
or mute (a running gag was that none of the four Darling boys ever 
said a word except when singing), and comfortably self-sufficient. 
But their primary function on the show was to provide musical 
entertainment. In actuality, the Darling sons were the Missouri 
Ozarks string band the Dillards, who wrote many of the songs they 
performed on the program. Music is central to the Darlings‘ way of 
life, a point driven home by family patriarch Briscoe. ―You got 
time to breathe, you got time for music,‖ he tells Andy in one 
episode. Although clearly presented as comical throwbacks, this is 
not a demeaning portrait . . . but one that celebrates genuine 
indigenous folk music. The Darlings mention many laughably 
titled songs such as ―Never Hit Your Grandma with a Big Stick,‖ 
but the songs they actually played were either songs the Dillards 
had composed or traditional southern folk tunes like ―Boil Them 
Cabbage Down‖ and ―There is a Time for Love and Laughter.‖ 
The family always seems somewhat ill at ease during their periodic 
visits to Mayberry and even pose a potential threat to the townsfolk 
(Briscoe kidnaps Aunt Bee in one episode and brings her back to 
his cabin in an effort to convince her to marry him). But Sheriff 
Taylor appreciates their authentic mountain mannerisms and 
culture, and the feeling is mutual. ―That haircut of yourn may be 
city-style,‖ Briscoe warmly tells Taylor, ―but your heart was 
shaped in a bowl‖ (Harkins 2004: 182). 
 
475 
 
Briscoe Darling was played by Denver Pyle, a veteran of numerous TV westerns, who 
would revive his characterization of a slow-talking, philosophical southern patriarch as Uncle 
Jesse on The Dukes of Hazzard. The most memorable of Mayberry‘s hillbillies, however, was 
portrayed by New York native Howard Morris, who had first risen to fame as a regular on Sid 
Caesar‘s landmark comedy program Your Show of Shows. Known for his frenzied physical 
comedy and tremendous range of vocal characterizations, Morris did a memorable turn on Andy 
Griffith as Ernest T. Bass, a screeching, rock-throwing lunatic who, according to Harkins, 
exemplified some of the darker hillbilly stereotypes:      
If the Darlings represent the slightly reckless musical 
mountaineers, Ernest T. Bass symbolizes the deranged mountain 
man, so wild that even his fellow hill folk consider him a threat      
. . . . Bass is a half-savage who has a simian-like gait and shrieks 
like a chimpanzee. His trademark is throwing rocks and bricks 
through windows . . . . Although he continually tries to fit into 
society and social institutions—different episodes portray his effort 
to join the army, to mingle at a formal reception, and to gain a 
primary-school education—his every encounter with civilization 
inevitably proves disastrous and each episode closes with Sheriff 
Taylor hastening him back to the mountains hoping he will not 
return. Although Bass is ostensibly a comedic character, potential 
violence always underlies his eccentricity, and the distance 
between his characterization and the outwardly vicious . . . 
mountain savages of Deliverance is not that great (Harkins 2004: 
183-184). 
 
The Darlings and Ernest T. Bass appeared in numerous episodes during Andy Griffith‘s 
early years, particularly, and probably not coincidentally, in 1963 and 1964, when The Beverly 
Hillbillies was the highest-rated show on television. They disappeared after October 1966. Still, 
before, after, and even during this ―hillbilly surge,‖ the streets of Mayberry remained the primary 
focus. It was always much more of a small-town show than a rural one.  
476 
 
As mentioned, Andy Griffith‘s assessment of southern small-town life was unceasingly 
positive. Its central geographic message was that life there moved very slowly. Scenes took place 
at the All Souls Church, where Andy and Barney sang in the choir; in the woods around Myer‘s 
Lake; at Andy‘s lodge, at the courthouse and barbershop; on the sidewalks where old men played 
checkers or dominoes; or on the front porch of Andy‘s house, where he and Barney were often 
seen recovering from one of Aunt Bee‘s enormous suppers. The style of the show, in the words 
of television historian Jerry Haggins, was ―strikingly distinct, employing a relaxed, almost 
lethargic tone‖ (Haggins 2010: 1). Physical evidence of that languid pace could be found in the 
show‘s scripts, which usually ran about thirty pages, as compared to those of a fast-paced sitcom 
like The Phil Silvers Show, which averaged forty-five pages. The major plot points of a typical 
episode were often book-ended, or even interrupted, by casual conversations between the 
characters, as when Barney discussed his most recent major purchase:   
BARNEY: The last big buy I made was my mom‘s and dad‘s 
anniversary present. 
ANDY: What‘d ya get ‗em? 
BARNEY: A septic tank. 
ANDY: For their anniversary? 
BARNEY: They‘re awful hard people to buy for. Besides, it was 
something they can use. They were really thrilled. It had two tons 
of concrete in it. All steel reinforced. 
ANDY: You‘re a fine son, Barn. 
BARNEY: I try. (Mitz 1988: 145). 
 
Perhaps the single best description of the town‘s pace came from Andy Taylor himself, when he 
was asked in an episode for a description of Mayberry: 
477 
 
There‘s not much to tell. It‘s just a little town. We hang around, get 
up in the morning and go to work and come home. For 
entertainment, we have television and movies, and we take rides in 
the car out of town on Sunday. We have our local baseball team, 
and we fish, and we have creeks we swim in. Evenings we sit 
around on the porch and visit, watch the children playing under the 
streetlights. (Javna 1988: 47).  
 
The place that became the model for millions about small-town southern life was actually 
located on a studio back lot in Culver City, California. Exteriors were filmed in Franklin Canyon, 
with Franklin Lake, a Los Angeles reservoir, serving as the famous fishing hole from the 
opening credits. Mayberry was modeled, in part, after Andy Griffith‘s hometown, Mount Airy, 
North Carolina, which is located near the Virginia border, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge 
Mountains, about 142 miles from Raleigh. Mayberry was situated in approximately the same 
place, located, depending on the episode, fifty-five, sixty, or a hundred miles from Raleigh. A 
few of Mayberry‘s establishments, such as the Snappy Lunch and the Grand Theatre, share 
names with real Mount Airy institutions. The larger part of Mayberry‘s geography was, of 
course, shaped in the minds of the show‘s writers and viewers. It is important to note that The 
Andy Griffith Show was not actually created by Griffith himself, but by New Yorker Sheldon 
Leonard who, in the words of critic Ken Tucker, ―must have dreamed up the Southern town of 
Mayberry as a city-slicker‘s idea of heaven‖ (Tucker 2005: 118-119). 
The notion that Mayberry was the real star of Andy Griffith is supported by its 
continuance on CBS‘s Monday night line-up for three years after Griffith‘s 1968 departure. 
Mayberry R .F. D. featured much of the original cast and a new lead character, Sam Jones. Sam, 
like Andy, was a widower with a young son. He had just moved to Mayberry, and was elected to 
the town council despite having no particular interest in, or qualifications for the job. This new 
478 
 
position allowed him to serve much the same purpose as Andy, a focus for the interactions of 
Mayberry‘s residents. This rather contrived scenario worked, for the show ranked fourth in the 
Nielsen ratings during its first two seasons. Although it slipped in its third year, it was still 
ranked fifteenth when it was cancelled as part of CBS‘s great rural purge of 1971.  
With Mayberry R. F. D.‘s cancellation, North Carolina disappeared from the television 
landscape for more than twenty years, and would have to wait three decades for a show that 
lasted more than a single season. Between 1994 and 2002, four programs—two comedies and 
two dramas—were set in the state. The comedies were set in urban areas, and both chronicled the 
lives of African-American families. My Brother and Me, which aired for three months in 1994 
on cable‘s Nickelodeon network, was the story of an eight-year-old boy named Dee Dee who 
lived with his family in suburban Charlotte. His mother, Jennifer, was a driver‘s education 
instructor and his father, Roger, a sportswriter. Dee Dee idolized his cool older brother in this 
good-natured sitcom but battled with his self-centered sister. Goode Behavior, which aired 
during the 1996-1997 season, featured Sherman Hemsley as Willie, a scheming excon who had 
been sent to prison for insider trading. He was paroled on the condition that he live with his son, 
the conceited Franklin, who was dean of humanities at Chapel Hill‘s fictional Henshaw State 
University. Barbara was Franklin‘s wife, a television news anchor, and Bianca their materialistic 
daughter.  
North Carolina‘s first two dramas channeled the spirit of Mayberry, at least to some 
degree. The Road Home, which aired for seven weeks in 1994, was a heartwarming story about 
Jack and Alison Mason and their four kids. In the premiere, they were a Detroit family on 
summer vacation in Alison‘s hometown in coastal North Carolina when they discovered that her 
479 
 
brother was having trouble keeping up the family‘s shrimping business and that her mother was 
in failing health. In true television drama fashion, they decided to stick around and help out.   
The good-natured drama State of Grace, which aired during the 2001-2002 season, was 
the story of two twelve-year-old girls who met at an upscale Catholic school, St. Christina‘s in 
the Pines. Set in a small town near Asheville in 1965, the two primary characters were Hannah 
Rayburn, the new girl whose family had just arrived from Chicago to start a furniture factory, 
and gregarious Grace McKee, who took Hannah under her wing. Much of the show revolved 
around the girls‘ contrasting families. Grace‘s home life had wealth and glamor, but was 
somewhat desolate. Her parents were divorced and her mother often away, leaving Grace in the 
care of the family‘s maid and chauffer. Hannah‘s Jewish family, on the other hand, was very 
close, loving and uproarious, but also intense, nervous, and smothering. Most of the stories 
involved lessons about cultural differences and the usual coming-of-age fare. State of Grace 
tackled some serious themes, most notably the anti-Semitism that the Rayburns often 
encountered, but, in general, the show possessed the same gentle warmth that had characterized 
The Andy Griffith Show.         
North Carolina‘s third drama, One Tree Hill, was not so warm and hardly gentle. Filmed 
in Wilmington, the old stomping grounds of the WB network‘s Massachusetts-based teen soap, 
Dawson‟s Creek, One Tree Hill debuted in 2003 as a testosterone-drenched replacement for 
Dawson and the gang. In spirit it was a world away from Mayberry. Dan Scott had been a 
basketball star in his hometown of Tree Hill, North Carolina, and his high-school sweetheart, 
Karen Roe, had gotten pregnant their senior year and gave birth to a son, Lucas. Dan had 
abandoned her and gone to college where he married Deb, and they had a son, Nathan. As the 
series began, Dan‘s basketball career was over and he returned to Tree Hill to open a car 
480 
 
dealership. Spoiled Nathan became the star of the high school basketball team, while sullen 
Lucas, who had been raised by a single mom, played street ball on his own. Eventually he joined 
the team, sparking quite a competition, on the court and off, between the two half-brothers. In 
addition to plenty of basketball, the show contained the usual soap-opera elements: love 
triangles, divorce, heart attacks, drinking problems, bankruptcy, casual sex, rehab, near-death 
experiences, obsessed stalkers, suicide attempts, and teen pregnancy.  
One Tree Hill continued to run through 2010, making it North Carolina‘s longest-running 
program since Andy Griffith. Appearing on the WB (now CW) network, the show has never put 
up stellar numbers, and it is highly unlikely that One Tree Hill will ever inspire the same kind 
zealotry that has kept Mayberry on the air for more a half century. Its longevity, however, is still 
geographically significant. The show‘s audience is young, and obviously devoted, and their 
attachment to the program indicates an increasing willingness to accept a new vision of the 
small-town South.  
 
SOUTH CAROLINA 
As mentioned, Maine‘s television landscape played on the state‘s reputation of quiet 
charm by soaking all of that quaintness in pools of blood, and the same was the case in South 
Carolina‘s lone television entry, American Gothic. The town of Trinity certainly seemed idyllic, 
with beautiful antebellum homes, ornate lawns, a charming downtown, and moonlight-and-
magnolias atmosphere, but it had a dark side, specifically in the form of the town sheriff. 
Whereas Mayberry‘s Sheriff Andy Taylor had used his easy-going wit to maintain law and order, 
Trinity‘s Sheriff Lucas Buck waxed demonic, committing murders or inducing others to do the 
481 
 
same. The principal plot involved his attempts to get closer to ten-year-old Caleb, who did not 
know Lucas was his father or that Lucas had raped his mother. Lucas killed Caleb‘s older sister 
and, as the series approached its end, eventually tried to kill Caleb as well. Viewers preferred 
Mayberry, and American Gothic expired after running for the duration of the 1995-1996 season.      
 
LOUISIANA 
 Viewers in most southern states had to wait some time to see themselves represented on 
American television. North Carolina and Virginia first appeared in the 1960s; Georgia and West 
Virginia in the 1970s; Mississippi in the 1980s; and Alabama, Arkansas, and South Carolina in 
the 1990s. Kentucky and Tennessee each had one short-lived program in the 1950s, but it was 
Louisiana that led the way, serving as a setting to three programs in that decade. Altogether, 
Louisiana has had twelve television entries, a respectable number by regional standards, but none 
of them were particularly successful. No Louisiana-based program has ever appeared in the 
Nielsen top thirty, and only one network program set in the state has lasted more than one 
season. For those who did watch, they found a state characterized by colorful, free-living people, 
with a fair amount of crime, violence, corruption, and an occasional swamp creature mixed in.  
 The state‘s first program, The Adventures of Jim Bowie, debuted in 1956 and aired for 
two years. Set in 1830s Louisiana, it was a sort of ―southern western,‖ as was its counterpart, 
Yancy Derringer, which premiered in 1958 and ran for just under a year. The title character of 
Yancy Derringer had all the ingredients of a conventional western hero. He was an ex-
Confederate soldier, a dedicated crime fighter, a gambler and ladies‘ man, and he even had his 
own Native American sidekick, a Pawnee named Pahoo. The show took place shortly after the 
Civil War, and its characterization of New Orleans as a wide-open city was not terribly different 
482 
 
from most other programs that have been set there. Jim Bowie featured the adventures of the title 
frontiersman and plantation owner with a number of other legendary characters from the early 
West thrown in: Johnny Appleseed, John James Audubon, Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, and 
Andrew Jackson. Several episodes were wilderness adventures, but many also took place in New 
Orleans, and let the viewer know that, even in the 1830s, the Crescent City was already 
colorfully corrupt. Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman described one such episode: 
As the story opens, Bowie is telling one Senator Holcomb about 
the campaigning he did for both Holcomb and Jackson. Holcomb 
responds that, ―such loyalty should not go unrewarded.‖ He tells 
Bowie that Jackson has ―a very deep sense of gratitude. So deep, in 
fact, that his enemies label his devotion to his friends as the spoils 
system.‖ He then offers Bowie the office of Collector for the Port 
of New Orleans in exchange for procuring a favorite racehorse for 
the President. Holcomb‘s pitch presses all the right buttons. ―Think 
of the prestige, my boy, not to mention the fortune for a man of 
your talents.‖ This last is accompanied by a knowing look . . . . To 
get the money he needs, Bowie casts his lot with his friend Sam 
Houston, who is portrayed here as a local politician. In the end, 
however, Houston double-crosses him, steals the horse, and rides 
off to give it to the President himself (Lichter, Licther, and 
Rothman 1991: 263). 
 
That New Orleans, a city of middling size, would appear on television so early and so 
often suggests that Americans have had a genuine interest in the city, or at least that television 
producers thought this was so. The track record of the city‘s entries seems to suggest the latter. 
Every drama set in New Orleans has had a shorter run than the one before. Bourbon Street Beat 
premiered in 1959 and lasted slightly less than a year. Longstreet debuted in 1971 and lasted 
eleven months. It was followed in 1996 by The Big Easy, which lasted nine months. Orleans ran 
for three months in 1997, and Thief lasted just six weeks in 2006.  All five of these programs 
483 
 
were contemporary crime dramas, and all five followed the lead of Jim Bowie and Yancy 
Derringer in portraying the Crescent City as being both colorful and shady. 
Bourbon Street Beat was one of a rash of ABC programs of the late 1950s and early 
1960s to chronicle the lives of debonair young detectives, but it was by far the least successful 
among them. In an unusual twist, two of the program‘s main characters actually survived 
cancellation. Bourbon Street detective Rex Randolph headed to Los Angeles to join 77 Sunset 
Strip, while his partner, Kenny Madison, moved to Miami and Surfside Six. In the years 
following Rex and Kenny‘s departure, New Orleans‘s crime dramas became increasingly 
colorful and seedy. The title character of Longstreet was a highly successful insurance 
investigator who worked the streets of New Orleans for the Great Pacific Casualty Insurance 
Company. The twist was that Mike Longstreet was blind. Adding color was a lively cast of 
supporting characters, including Mike‘s braille teacher and Girl Friday, Nikki Bell; his Kung Fu 
instructor Li Tsung (played by Bruce Lee); and his German shepherd guide dog, Pax.  
The Big Easy was the story of colorful ladies‘ man and police detective Remy McSwain. 
The only-in-New-Orleans supporting characters on the program included a jazz musician and 
street informant named Smiley Dupree, and the improbably named assistant district attorney, 
Lightnin‘ Hawkins. In true New Orleans fashion, Remy was ―always ready to bend the law to get 
things done—as was everyone else in the Crescent City, apparently‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 
139). The equally sleazy crime drama Orleans was the story of a New Orleans judge named 
Luther Charbonnet. Storylines revolved around the personal lives of Luther and his three 
children, set against a backdrop rife with sex, murder, drugs, and organized crime. Luther was 
having an affair with Rosalee, a young black defense attorney, while his son, a young prosecutor 
named Jesse, was having an affair with his cousin Rene. Daughter Paulette was a riverboat 
484 
 
casino manager with a shadowy past, and son Claude, a detective for the New Orleans police, 
was trying to rid his department of corruption. The coup de grace of Crescent City crime was 
Thief, an exceptionally violent series about a New Orleans-based crew of expert thieves and their 
high-profile targets. The crew of Thief included Elmo, who was trying to raise money for his 
impoverished family, drug addict Izzy, and Jack, the Pentecostal cracker who believed that God 
was helping him steal. The primary antagonists of Thief were Vincent Chan, an assassin for the 
Chinese mafia, and John Hayes, a corrupt New Orleans cop. 
Two reality programs found their way to the post-Katrina New Orleans of 2006, both 
featuring activities consistent with action on the city‘s previous television entries. Celebrity 
Poker Showdown, where celebrities played Texas Hold ‗Em for charity, relocated from Las 
Vegas to Harrah‘s in New Orleans for its final season. This program had a cheerfully boozy 
atmosphere, with eliminated players making wisecracks from the garishly decorated ―Losers 
Lounge.‖ New Orleans‘s second reality entry traced its roots to Coyote Ugly, a country bar in 
New York City, notorious for raucous late nights and scantily clad, bar-dancing cowgirls. In 
2000, Coyote Ugly inspired a movie of the same name, and the movie, in turn, inspired 
numerous franchises of Coyote Ugly across the country. In The Ultimate Coyote Ugly Search, 
ten women competed for employment (and $25,000) at the newest Coyote Ugly in New Orleans.  
Only two of Louisiana‘s entries have been set outside of New Orleans. Although their 
formulas varied somewhat from the standard fare, they did possess the same kind of sinister, 
shadowy flavor. Louisiana‘s longest-running series, and one of its most unusual, was set in the 
swamps near Houma. Swamp Thing, which aired in seventy-two installments from 1990 to 1993, 
was a campy cable television version of the cult-classic comic book and movie series. As the 
series began, an environmental disaster caused by evil Dr. Anton Arcane had transformed likable 
485 
 
Dr. Alec Holland into a creature ―resembling a large stick of broccoli‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 
1342). Episodes involved the noble Swamp Thing‘s efforts to protect the local wetlands and its 
residents from the schemes of the greedy Dr. Arcane.  
The Riches also appeared on basic cable, with nineteen episodes airing in 2006 and 2007. 
It was the story of the Malloys, a family of Roma (Gypsies) who travelled about swindling 
unsuspecting citizens. Wayne was the imaginative, charismatic father, and Dahlia his unstable, 
drug-addicted wife who had just gotten out of jail. Their three children, Cael, Sam, and Di Di, 
were all accomplished grifters. In the premiere, Dahlia‘s violent brother, Dale, the head of the 
clan, declared that Di Di must marry her idiot cousin, prompting Wayne and Dahlia to steal the 
clan‘s money and flee in their beat-up RV. While driving they were involved in a car accident 
that killed a young couple, the Riches. The Malloys promptly stole the Riches‘ identity and 
settled into a posh life in a gated community near Baton Rouge.      
Out of Louisiana‘s twelve entries, just one was a sitcom, but it was not of the 
conventional sort. In the 2000s, sitcoms that dispensed with the traditional laugh track and three-
wall set had become commonplace. Had Frank‟s Place appeared in the 2000s, it might have had 
a longer lifespan, but viewers were not sure what to make of it in 1987. Adored by the creative 
community, Frank‟s Place was nominated for nine Emmy awards, winning three, and also won 
the prestigious Humanitas Prize given to programs that ―affirm human dignity and probe the 
meaning of life‖ (Bogle 2001: 325). With a largely black cast, the show did well among African-
American households, but finished its first season ranked sixty-second on the Nielsen charts, and 
was cancelled after airing for a little more than a year.  
486 
 
Frank‟s Place was the story of Frank Parrish, a former history professor who left his 
native New England for New Orleans after inheriting a Creole restaurant, the Chez Louisiane, 
from his estranged father. Flavored with Dixieland music, episodes focused on Frank‘s 
adjustments to the unusual city, his eccentric restaurant staff, and the equally eccentric 
customers, which included a con-man minister and the owners of the neighborhood funeral 
parlor. Critics applauded the show for its depiction of an educated, middle-class, black man who 
managed to maintain connections to his cultural roots, and for its forthright examinations of 
racial issues between blacks and whites and within the African-American community. Frank‟s 
Place did not shy away from tough topics, tackling cancer, suicide, drug abuse, and drunk 
driving, but the show was also quite funny. Even better was its remarkable portrayal of New 
Orleans. On Frank‟s Place, life in New Orleans was balanced—sometimes rough, even grim, but 
also romantic and almost dream-like at times. In the words of critic Donald Bogle, Frank soon 
found himself ―as intrigued as we are by the city‘s rich culture: its food, its music, its social 
clubs, its jazzy seductiveness.‖  
In many respects, Frank‟s Place was a mood piece, a dream play, 
its tone set at each week‘s opening with the voice of Louis 
Armstrong on the soundtrack singing ‗Do You Know What It 
Means to Miss New Orleans?‘ This melancholic, evocative song 
conjures up the New Orleans of our imagination: a city of lights 
and color, magic and Mardi Gras, mystery and romance . . . . 
Frank‟s Place had a misty, hazy look making it seem all the more 
like a story filtered through memory and dreams (Bogle 2001: 
323).  
  
ALABAMA 
Alabama has been the setting for just two television entries, and neither appeared on a 
major network. The first, Any Day Now, aired on cable‘s Lifetime network from 1998 to 2002. 
487 
 
Set in Birmingham, this languid drama was the story of the friendship of Mary Elizabeth (M. E.) 
O‘Brien and Rene Jackson. M. E. was white and from the wrong side of the tracks, while Rene 
was black and the daughter of a respected civil rights lawyer. M. E. had become pregnant at a 
young age by her boyfriend Colliar, a miserable slug who was even lower on the socio-economic 
ladder than M. E. They remained in Birmingham, where their life was plagued by tragedy. 
Colliar never amounted to much, the first of their three children had drowned, and their teenage 
daughter was in constant trouble. Nevertheless, M. E. was able to get a book published and was 
offered a teaching position at a local college. Rene had left Birmingham to become a successful 
lawyer in Washington, D. C., but returned home after her father‘s death to carry on his work. The 
two friends reconnected, with the action alternating between the trials of their present-day life 
and coming-of-age stories from their childhood in the 1960s.   
Any Day Now‘s presence on Lifetime guaranteed a relatively small audience, but, for 
what it‘s worth, it was for a time the network‘s highest-rated drama, and it was generally well-
received by critics. They lauded the show‘s frank examination of racial issues, and its featuring a 
pair of mature female protagonists. In that regard, Any Day Now was certainly different from 
most other television programs of its era. That said, its geographic message was nothing new, but 
simply a reinforcement of the geographic message of countless books and films, and even a few 
television shows, most notably Georgia‘s I‟ll Fly Away. Whether it was M. E.‘s wrong-side-of-
the-tracks upbringing, her racist parents, and her lazy husband, or the fact that Rene was yet 
another black character who returned to the South as a sacrifice for the Cause, Any Day Now did 
not go out of its way to shatter common images of the region. Whether or not these images are 
accurate is another matter, but the Alabama of Any Day Now is exactly the sort of Alabama that 
viewers could have expected—a place where everything moves slowly, where racial tension is 
488 
 
strong, and where life, like the relationship of M. E. and Rene, is firmly rooted in the 
remembrance of days past.  
If there was one familiar Alabama stereotype that Any Day Now missed, it was the state‘s 
all-consuming passion for football, but MTV covered that in 2006 with Two-a-Days, a 
documentary series about a high school team, the players‘ families and girlfriends, and the 
determined, tough-as-nails coach. The program was filmed in Hoover, Alabama, home of the 
Buccaneers who were seeking their fourth state championship. One player summed up the 
town‘s attitude toward the sport: ―Football has pretty much been my whole life‖ (Brooks and 
Marsh 2007: 1,445). 
 
VIRGINIA 
Virginia‘s two earliest entries were period pieces, the first a Civil War drama that aired, 
perhaps appropriately, in 1961, the 100th anniversary of the commonwealth‘s secession from the 
Union. The Americans told the story of the Canfield brothers from Harpers Ferry whose loyalties 
were divided during the Civil War. The reckless and stubborn younger brother, Jeff, decided to 
fight for the Confederacy, while older brother Jeff swam across the Potomac to side with the 
Union. The two brothers were shown, on alternating weeks, fighting for their respective sides. 
The Americans was not high drama, but a sort of southern western, described by Variety as a 
―wholly fictional and unbelievable sequence of events that could just as easily have come out of 
a Bonanza or an Outlaws‖ (Mehling 1962: 69). Viewers were not terribly impressed either, and 
Virginia‘s first entry was off the air after just nine months.  
489 
 
Virginia‘s second entry, which came along a decade later, lasted for nine years. Set in 
rural (and fictional) Jefferson County during the Great Depression, The Waltons was the story of 
John and Olivia Walton and their seven children. The very definition of a wholesome television 
family, the Waltons were, despite their humble means, loving, close and loyal. John and his 
father, Zeb, ran a lumber mill on Walton‘s Mountain, located in the Blue Ridge region of 
western Virginia. The stories were related by John‘s eldest son, John Boy, an aspiring novelist. 
―Moralistic homilies abounded,‖ wrote Brooks and Marsh, adding that ―there was no sex, no 
violence—just a warm family drama‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 1,484).  
To say that The Waltons was a surprise hit would an understatement. To begin, it was 
something of an anomaly when it arrived on the CBS fall schedule in 1972. Of the thirty highest-
rated shows from the previous season, eight were sitcoms, headed by the likes of All in the 
Family, Sanford & Son, and Mary Tyler Moore. Another seven were police or detective 
programs, such as Hawaii 5-0, Ironside, and Adam 12. Most of the rest were either modern urban 
dramas (Marcus Welby, Medical Center, Room 222) or variety/comedy series with established 
stars (Flip Wilson, Rowan and Martin, Carol Burnett, and Sonny and Cher). A warm, wholesome 
family drama certainly did not appear to be in high demand, much less one set in rural Virginia 
of the 1930s. To find a program like The Waltons on CBS was especially surprising, given that 
the network had, only a year before, eliminated most rural programs from its schedule.  
The Waltons, according to television historian Anthony Harkins, had ―escaped the 
network‘s general purge of all things country because it had the strong backing of CBS founder 
and chairman William Paley, who saw it as a ‗prestige‘ program‖ (Harkins 2004: 205). Still, it 
did not appear that the network had high hopes for the program, placed as it was on Thursday 
night opposite two big hits, ABC‘s The Mod Squad and NBC‘s The Flip Wilson Show. During 
490 
 
the 1971-1972 season, The Mod Squad was ranked twenty-first in the Nielsen ratings, and had 
been ranked in the top thirty during each of its first four seasons. Even more daunting, The Flip 
Wilson Show had been ranked in the second spot in each of its two seasons, trailing only Marcus 
Welby and then All in the Family. To the surprise of everybody, The Waltons managed to pull off 
the upset. When the dust settled after the 1972-1973 season, The Waltons had premiered at a 
respectable nineteenth. Flip Wilson had dropped from second to twelfth, and The Mod Squad had 
been cancelled. After the 1973-1974 season, The Waltons had rocketed to second place, and The 
Flip Wilson Show was off the air. While it was never a blockbuster in large cities, The Waltons, 
according to Brooks and Marsh, ―struck a chord in middle and rural America that guaranteed a 
long and prosperous run‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 1,484). 
 The Waltons was based on Earl Hamner Jr.‘s 1961 novel Spencer‟s Mountain, which had 
inspired a 1963 theatrical film of the same name starring Henry Fonda.  The book was also 
adapted for a CBS television movie called The Homecoming, which became the basis for the 
television series. Hamner, who served as coexecutive producer and story editor for The Waltons, 
was one of eight children brought up during the Depression in Schuyler, Virginia, a small 
community about thirty miles from Charlottesville. It was clear that he, the real-life John Boy, 
loved his hometown. His production notes reveal an intention to create a realistic series, avoiding 
both the ―excessive sentimentality‖ of previous nostalgic programs such as Mama, and pejorative 
hillbilly stereotypes. ―That the Waltons are poor should be obvious,‖ wrote Hamner, ―but there 
should be no hint of squalor or debased living conditions usually associated with poverty‖ 
(Wilson 2010: 1).   
 Whether or not the show was realistic, Hamner did succeed in creating one of television‘s 
most endearing portraits of the South. The Waltons, as noted by television historian Pamela 
491 
 
Wilson, stood in stark contrast to the gritty urban streets and dysfunctional families of New York 
and California that dominated much of the rest of the television landscape at the time:  
The Walton family was portrayed as a cohesive and nearly self-
sufficient social world. The family members operated as a team, 
full of collective wisdom and insight, yet always finding narrative 
(and physical) space for their individuality. In addition to the 
continuing narrative development of each regular character and of 
the family dynamics over the course of the series, each episode 
frequently dealt with a conflict or tension introduced by an outsider 
who happened into the community, bringing their own problems 
which were potentially disruptive influences upon the harmony and 
equilibrium of the Walton‘s Mountain community. The narrative 
of each episode worked through the resolution of these tensions 
within the household, as well as the healing or spiritual uplift 
achieved by the outsider characters as they assimilated the values 
of the family and learned their lessons of love and morality 
(Wilson 2010: 1).  
 
Each week, The Waltons offered emotional, often bittersweet stories, but the central geographic 
message was that this little mountain community was an environment of dignity, warmth, quiet 
intelligence, and simple wisdom.    
 Along with its runaway popularity, The Waltons was a critical success, receiving 
generally positive reviews and, over the course of its run, a dozen Emmy awards. It was not, 
however, without its critics. Some people contended that The Waltons did not look hard enough 
at rural poverty, and argued that it was ―too sweet, sappily sentimental, and exploitative of 
viewers‘ emotions.‖ One critic wrote that its ―homey wisdom and Sunday school platitudes have 
been known to make me gag,‖ while another complained about its ―intolerable wistfulness,‖ and 
still another labeled the Waltons an ―obviously corny, totally unreal family‖ (Wilson 2010: 1). 
Today, some detractors remember the show as straightforward, right-wing, family-values 
propaganda, which is a quite a stretch, but that notion was solidified in 1991 when Pat 
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Robertson‘s Christian Coalition obtained exclusive syndication rights for the series. Subsequent 
television retrospectives have tended to dismiss the show, with one work referring to it as the 
―sentimental saga about a barefoot-but-happy hick family‖ (Lewis and Stempel 1996: 229). 
Another was even more severe, saying of the show‘s success that ―one man‘s white trash is a 
network‘s treasure‖ (West 2005: 22). 
 Critic Ken Tucker, not known for his sentimentality, asserted that such assessments were 
unfair. He acknowledged that The Waltons was ―lost in many people‘s memories as a 
sentimental, preachy show,‖ but argued that it ―achieved what it set out to do: make lyrically 
idealized a group of lives lived in splendid isolation, with the promise of escape to a bigger 
world for those who yearned for it.‖ More important, Tucker dismissed the notion that The 
Waltons was nostalgic drivel, noting that in its own wholesome way, the show tackled very real, 
timeless issues. He cited a 1976 episode called ―The Quilting‖ as the ―exemplar of everything 
good about The Waltons:‖  
The theme is all about letting people make their own decisions. 
The chief plot point turns around a quilting party to be held for 
eldest daughter Mary Ellen; her mother and grandmother accept 
this tradition as part of life, since it serves as a ―coming-out party‖ 
for the budding seventeen-year-old, the signal that boys can come 
a-courtin‘ for her. But Mary Ellen is intent on going to nursing 
school and leading an independent life; she wants no part of 
quilting—a not-so-subtle metaphor for the fabric of family life—
gets angry and runs away. Grandma and Mama Walton think Mary 
Ellen is just being teenage-typical stubborn, but the clan‘s wise 
father, John Walton . . . takes the young woman‘s reservations 
seriously, and thinks Mary Ellen should decide for herself what to 
do . . . . Mary Ellen gets a fine, spitting speech about how she 
resents the quilting for the way it will ―put me on the market for 
marriage . . . . I am not a piece of merchandise!‖ . . . . Interestingly, 
it‘s John-Boy, who himself wants to leave the mountain to launch 
his own career, who argues with her that the quilting isn‘t a slave 
contract but ―it‘s a gift . . . to remind you of people who were fond 
of you when you were growing up‖ (Tucker 2005: 240-242).   
493 
 
 
 Having stunned Flip Wilson and The Mod Squad in 1972, The Waltons went on to anchor 
CBS‘s Thursday night line-up until 1981. Thursdays at 8:00 Eastern is a tough television 
neighborhood, however, and The Waltons eventually slipped to eighth during its third season. 
The show dropped out of the top ten the following year, but managed to rank in the Nielsen top 
thirty for seven of its nine seasons. It also enjoyed a long run in syndication, and spawned six TV 
reunion movies, the last of which aired in 1997. The success of The Waltons also inspired 
numerous imitators—most obviously Minnesota‘s Little House on the Prairie—but the same 
formula was never repeated in Virginia.  
All subsequent shows set in the state have had urban, contemporary settings, with all but 
one of them located in the northern Virginia suburbs of D. C. The state‘s third entry, Rituals, 
which was set in the fictional suburb of Wingfield, was the polar opposite of the Waltons, both in 
theme and, more markedly, in expectations and results. Rituals was a glitzy syndicated soap 
opera that told the story of three adversarial families: the Chapins, the Gallaghers, and the 
Robertsons. These groups had much more in common with the Ewings of Dallas or the 
Carringtons of Dynasty than they did with the Waltons, stocked as they were with avaricious, 
devious, selfish, and unscrupulous characters. And, while The Waltons had been a surprise hit, 
Rituals was a spectacular failure. It cost millions of dollars to produce, but drew few viewers, 
and barely limped through 1984-1985 season.           
Between 1990 and 2005, four more Virginia-based programs appeared, each of them 
focused on the lives of government employees. Two were family comedies, the first being Major 
Dad, which chronicled the marriage of hard-boiled, Marine Corps officer John MacGillis to 
Polly Cooper, a liberal journalist and widow with three daughters. The show debuted in 1989, 
494 
 
and was set in San Diego during its first season. MacGillis was then transferred to fictional 
Camp Hollister in Farlow, Virginia, near Washington, D. C., where the show remained for the 
rest of its run. Major Dad‘s warm and optimistic outlook on life was not unlike that of The 
Waltons, even if it lacked that show‘s gravitas. It was partly a gentle skewering of life in the 
Corps, reminiscent of Gomer Pyle, coupled with a heavy dose of family warmth. The show‘s 
story lines were hardly groundbreaking: the family adopted a homeless puppy; the officers 
organized a talent show, but no one could bear to tell the general he had no talent; Polly tried to 
get her hard-boiled Marine to show his soft side; and so on.  
Major Dad‘s only substantial departure from the carefree formula came when it dealt 
with real-life military issues, such as the threat of Camp Hollister‘s closure due to reduced 
military spending. It‘s most sobering moments came during the run-up to the 1991 war in Kuwait 
and Iraq. The major told Polly that he was anxious to ―get over to Saudi,‖ even though that 
meant leaving his wife and three stepdaughters behind. ―I have two families: One of them is 
here, safe at home,‖ he explained to Polly. ―But the other one is overseas and in harm‘s way, and 
I want to be with that family, to help them.‖ The major never shipped out, of course, but the war 
was a major part of the show‘s story lines for two seasons, and it caused tension between pacifist 
Polly and her hawkish husband. In one episode, Polly commented, ―Looking at my children, I 
have to believe in a brighter future and hang on to the hope that someday, they‘ll live in a world 
of peace, where no one will ever have to fight over a line drawn in the sand‖ (Tucker 1991a: 1).    
Major Dad was never regarded by critics as an artistic masterpiece, but it was popular for 
a time, ranking twenty-second on the Nielsen charts during its first year based in Virginia and 
shooting to ninth place the next season. The next year, however, the show was moved from 
Monday to Friday nights. Ratings plummeted, and Major Dad was cancelled.    
495 
 
Virginia‘s other family comedy was the cartoon American Dad!, which premiered in 
2005 and continued to air through 2010. It was considerably less syrupy than Major Dad, having 
been created by the same subversive team that produced Rhode Island‘s Family Guy. Like that 
show, the basic set-up of American Dad was nothing out of the ordinary. The title dad was Stan 
Smith, a feverishly patriotic, ultraconservative CIA agent who was hell-bent on protecting 
America from all possible threats. Stan lived in the fictional D. C. suburb of Langley Falls with 
his wife, Francine, a former wild child who was now striving to be a model suburban wife and 
mother; his daughter, Hayley, a college student who was as liberal as her father was 
conservative; and his son, Steve, a nerdy weakling who craved, but rarely received, Stan‘s 
approval.  
Also like Family Guy, the well-worn story lines resembled, at least at first, those of 
dozens of other suburban family sitcoms. On one episode, for example, Steve had a crush on a 
girl at school, and Stan encouraged him to impress her by running for class president. Steve won 
the election and the girl‘s heart, but he eventually discovered that she was only interested in him 
because of his newly elevated status. So he broke up with her. Such simplicity, however, was 
only half the story. As was the case on Family Guy, the banalities of setting and plot were only 
cover for some truly bizarre stuff. Stan, as it turned out, was not just a vigilant soldier in the War 
on Terror, but an obsessive one. He kept a color-coded Homeland Security terror advisory 
system magnet on his refrigerator and a gun handy in case Osama bin Laden tried to break into 
the house. And the ―threats‖ to America that concerned Stan included all radical elements, such 
as gays, feminists, minorities, and Democrats. To make matters a little more surreal, along for 
the ride was Roger, a cynical, manic-depressive, alcoholic alien who sounded an awful lot like 
Paul Lynde. Roger had saved Stan‘s life at Area 51, and was now hiding out from the 
496 
 
government in the Smith‘s attic. The family pet was Klaus, a goldfish with a crush on Francine 
who spoke with a thick German accent, the result of a CIA experiment gone awry. 
American Dad was, in part, a send-up of suburban conformity, but it was primarily a 
parody of Bush-era politics, especially in its early years. Stan was a cartoonish embodiment of 
neoconservatism and right-wing paranoia, and the show was especially pointed about the 
government‘s abuse of power. When Steve ran for school president, Stan rigged the election to 
guarantee his victory, and when a new girlfriend broke Steve‘s heart, Stan had her family 
deported. When Stan became jealous of Francine‘s success as a real estate broker, he hastened 
the demise of her firm by getting the Federal Reserve to impose a twenty-percent increase in 
interest rates—and he accomplished that by kidnapping Fed chairman Alan Greenspan‘s dog. 
When Stan forgot his anniversary, he took Francine to CIA headquarters and had her memory 
erased. And when Stan ran for church deacon, he enlisted the help of Bush adviser Karl Rove, 
portrayed on the show as a cloaked, grim reaper figure who achieved his evil goals by 
summoning the dark forces of hell.  
Despite the heavy dose of family dysfunction and shadowy government plots, American 
Dad did not paint a particularly negative portrait of life in suburban Virginia. Stan was a 
dedicated employee, Francine taught Sunday school, Steve was a Boy Scout, and Haley was a 
devoted student. With the exception of a lusty goldfish and an inebriated alien, the Smiths were a 
normal, solid, middle-class American family, and nearly every episode ended with one of the 
characters, usually Stan, learning something about the importance of a loving family. As strange 
as it may sound, the message of American Dad was, in essence, that of The Waltons.  
497 
 
Most of Virginia‘s television programs have left the state‘s reputation relatively 
unscathed. In the world of trigger-happy Stan Smith, threats to peace and civility came mostly 
from Stan himself. The only show to truly cast a pall of crime, poverty and violence over the Old 
Dominion was 2003‘s Line of Fire, a bleak drama set in Richmond. The protagonist was Lisa 
Cohen, the determined head of the F. B. I.‘s local office, and the show followed the efforts of 
Lisa and her team to bring down the syndicate operated by crime boss Jonah Malloy. ―Though he 
looked like an accountant,‖ wrote Brooks and Marsh, ―Jonah could be vicious, as when he 
whacked a man with a tire iron . . .or took a child as ‗collateral‘ in a drug deal, parking the kid 
with the call girls in his whore house‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 797). The very first scene of the 
series, in which an F. B. I. agent chased his quarry through grim back alleys near the James 
River, set the tone for the series, as described by critic Chris Elliot:  
Caught at the archetypal chain link fence (do crooks ever climb 
these things well?), Carl, a low-life mobster, lies amongst a pile of 
torn, black plastic garbage bags, which signify you‘ve wandered 
onto the wrong side of the tracks. FBI agent Bert Somers looks 
down at him, breathing hard and pleading with Carl to give himself 
up. But Carl‘s having none of it; he‘s got a family and he knows if 
he squeals, then it‘s the end of all of them. It‘s a tense, brief 
standoff—two men, two guns, followed soon after by two shots, 
and two dead bodies. Bert and Carl, we hardly knew you (Elliot 
2003: 1).  
 
Lucky for the Richmond Convention and Visitors Bureau, Line of Fire didn‘t outlive Bert 
and Carl by much, airing for just two months of the 2003-2004 season. The more successful, but 
no more cheery drama, Criminal Minds premiered in 2005. Child molesters, rapists and serial 
killers were the usual target of the F. B. I.‘s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Headed by dedicated 
Special Agent Jason Gideon, the crew was based in Quantico, and charged with profiling and 
hunting down the country‘s most perverse criminals. A sort of psychologist‘s twist on CSI, 
498 
 
Criminal Minds had been a mainstay in the Nielsen top thirty when it entered its sixth season in 
2010. Despite the show‘s often grim subject material, it had little impact on the television 
landscape of Virginia, since the team spent most its time crisscrossing the country in their 
specially modified jet, seeking out their latest warped prey. If anything, Criminal Minds 
reminded the viewer that evil was everywhere, and that one could rest easy knowing there was a 
team of bright, motivated individuals somewhere in northern Virginia ready to go out and hunt it 
down.      
 
MISSISSIPPI 
Mississippi‘s first entry was the sitcom Private Benjamin, which made its debut in the 
spring of 1981 and ran just shy of two seasons. Adapted from the hit 1980 Goldie Hawn film, it 
told the story of Judy Benjamin, a spoiled New York society girl who had run off to join the     
U. S. Army. Set at fictional Ft. Bradley, just outside of Biloxi, the show mainly involved the 
havoc created by Judy and her stereotypical band of platoon mates, which included Rayleen, a 
streetwise product of a Detroit ghetto; Maria, a wisecracking Italian-American; and Barbara Ann, 
a bumbling, country-music-wailing hayseed. In the end, they usually got the best of Captain 
Doreen Lewis, their perpetually frustrated commanding officer. Private Benjamin was more of a 
military spoof and class comedy than any kind of statement about life in Mississippi, although it 
did, with its fish-out-of-water theme, lend the state the same kind of backwater air as Kansas 
received from The Phil Silvers Show.    
 A far more forceful statement about life in contemporary Mississippi was made in the 
state‘s dramatic entry, In the Heat of the Night, which ran from 1988 to 1994. Based on the 
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award-winning 1967 film, this was the story of a gruff but wise Bill Gillespie, police chief of 
sleepy little Sparta, Mississippi. Much like Alabama‘s Any Day Now, the show was commended 
for its intelligent examination of race relations in the South, with TV Guide‘s Merrill Panitt 
commenting that ―So far as entertainment is concerned, Heat scores a B-minus as cop show. As 
an exercise in tolerance and understanding between races, which all of us—black and white—
can use, it warrants an A‖ (Bogle 2001: 328). As had been the case in the film, the show focused 
on the relationship between Chief Gillespie, the archetypal cagy southern lawman, and Virgil 
Tibbs, the department‘s black detective, who had been forced upon Gillespie by a mayor hoping 
to court Sparta‘s African-American vote. While Gillespie was hardly an abhorrent racist, he was 
a traditionalist, and did not always see eye-to-eye with Tibbs. In a broader sense, Gillespie and 
Tibbs represent a transition from the Old South to the New. Tibbs had spent many years as a 
policeman in Philadelphia, and was bent on bringing modern, big-city police methods to his 
hometown. The New South was also manifested in the person of Harriet DeLong, a black city 
councilwoman and, thus, another African-American authority figure in Sparta. In the Heat of the 
Night also took a relatively revolutionary step when Harriet and Bill had an affair and, in the 
final season, were married.  
 Still, the Old South was alive and well on the show. Things moved as slow as molasses in 
Sparta, and nearly every crime that Tibbs and Gillespie set out to solve involved someone who 
was related to one of the show‘s regulars or who, at the very least, was an old family friend. The 
familiar southern dramatic devices of substance abuse, violent crimes of passion, and even incest 
made appearances on In the Heat of the Night, and Sparta had a fairly high redneck factor, right 
down to the fact that Gillespie‘s top deputy was named Bubba.         
500 
 
As for Sparta‘s physical location, an unincorporated town by that name exists in northern 
Mississippi, although the show was filmed elsewhere—first in Hammond, Louisiana, and later in 
Covington and Conyers, Georgia—and the real Sparta was likely not the inspiration for the 
fictional one. The town‘s name had also been used in the 1967 film, and that was probably 
because much of the principal filming for the movie had taken placed in Sparta, Illinois, a small 
town southeast of St. Louis. Wherever it was, viewers enjoyed travelling there each week. In the 
Heat of the Night ranked eighteenth on the Nielsen charts after its first full season, and remained 
in the top thirty for four straight years.      
 
GEORGIA 
Georgia‘s first television entry came in 1977, on the heels of Jimmy Carter‘s 
inauguration, and was called, not coincidentally, Carter Country, set in fictional Clinton Corners, 
―just down the road the road from Plains,‖ Carter‘s hometown (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 223). 
The show was, of all things, a comic take on In the Heat of the Night, focusing on the 
relationship between a white sheriff, Roy Mobey, and his black deputy, Curtis Baker. As in Heat 
of the Night, the sheriff was affable and folksy, and his deputy sharp and urbane, having been 
trained in the big city police methods of New York City. Despite their differences, they 
eventually learned to respect one another and to work together.  Although Carter Country 
possessed some geographic contrasts common in many southern dramas—black and white, big 
city and backwoods, Old South and New South—none of this was taken seriously. The show 
also contained the sorts of characters that would be familiar in Georgia‘s early rural 
comedy/adventure series—a redneck deputy named Jasper; a libidinous policewoman named 
Cloris; and Teddy Burnside, the fat, spineless, wealthy mayor.  
501 
 
While never a major ratings success, Carter Country did manage to stay on the air for 
two seasons, and its very existence was somewhat significant to the South‘s television 
geography. It was the first comedy set in the region since ABC and CBS had carried out their 
purges of rural programming in 1971 and as such served as bridge to an even more extreme 
southern farce. This new show, 1979‘s The Dukes of Hazzard, was every bit the slice of 
cornbread that was Hee Haw and other programs the networks had fought so desperately to 
purge just eight years before. Yet, here it was again, and on CBS, no less. The essence of The 
Dukes of Hazzard was perhaps best captured by critic Jeff Alexander: 
In the Evel Knievel seventies, it didn‘t seem at all unusual to tune 
in every Friday night to see an orange Dodge Charger flying 
through the air. In hindsight, one realizes that Hazzard County 
must have been named for the ramp-shaped piles of dirt that dotted 
the roads every half mile or so. The amazing thing wasn‘t the 
extent to which vehicular aviation was commonplace, but the fact 
they were doing it on purpose. At least once an episode, we‘d 
expect to see the General Lee soaring gracefully into the southern 
sky, describing a perfect parabolic arc in slow motion while Bo 
and Luke emitted a tandem rebel yell out the open windows 
(Alexander 2008: 164). 
 
 The Dukes of Hazzard was created by Gy Waldron, and closely resembled his 1975 
theatrical comedy, Moonrunners, which was about a pair of Georgia cousins eluding the police 
while running moonshine for their uncle. The protagonists of the television series were Bo and 
Luke Duke, cousins who were, as the television show‘s theme song suggested, just good ol‘ 
boys. Bo and Luke‘s family bore a striking resemblance to characters from CBS‘s previous rural 
comedies. Wise old Uncle Jesse Duke was played by Denver Pyle, who was essentially reprising 
his role as Briscoe Darling on The Andy Griffith Show, and cousin Daisy Duke, a tomboyish 
sexpot, was a hell-raising version of The Beverly Hillbillies‘s Elly May Clampett. Country music 
502 
 
star Waylon Jennings narrated the series. The primary antagonist was the fat, frenetic, white-
flannel-suit-clad and memorably named Jefferson Davis Hogg, a local political boss who seemed 
to own everything in Hazzard County. Hogg had it in for the Dukes, and they spent much of their 
time eluding him and Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane, Hogg‘s slow-witted brother-in-law. The real 
star of the show—which reportedly got half the fan mail—was the General Lee, an indestructible 
Day-Glo orange 1969 Dodge Charger, which sported a rebel flag on the roof and a horn that 
played ―Dixie.‖ Most of the episodes revolved around the Dukes undoing Hogg‘s shady 
schemes, and usually involved a liberal dose of car chases, up-tempo country music, and half-
naked young women.    
 Some question exists about the precise setting of the show, with Hazzard County vaguely 
identified as being ―east of the Mississippi and south of the Ohio‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 
397). Based on the landscapes from the program, Hazzard County very well could have been 
anywhere or, more precisely, everywhere within that large space. The Encyclopedia of Southern 
Culture described the fictional county as ―a land of swamps (complete with alligators!), fertile 
valleys, pine barrens, and mountains; in short, the fictional county‘s geography is that of the 
South as a whole‖ (Blake 2002: 1). An argument can be made for Kentucky as the location. 
Series creator Gy Waldron was a Kentucky native, a real Hazard, Kentucky, exists about a 
hundred miles southeast of Lexington, and some of the show‘s stars made appearances at 
festivals in and around that community. For most of the show‘s run, the bulk of the filming 
actually took place on a back lot of Warner Brother Studios in Burbank. Before production 
moved to California, however, the show‘s abbreviated first season was filmed in and around 
Covington, Georgia, about thirty-four miles east of Atlanta. That fact, coupled with several 
scripts that have the Duke boys taking day trips to Atlanta, makes Covington, in the words of 
503 
 
television historian Tim Hollis, ―probably as close to the real Hazzard as anyone is likely to find‖ 
(Hollis 2008: 240). 
 The geographic traits of Hazzard County were not unlike those found in scores of 
southern films and television shows. It was yet another story about a small town and the rural 
areas around it. The Duke family, while not Kornfield Kounty bumpkins, were not sophisticates. 
In one episode where the Dukes ventured into Atlanta, narrator Waylon Jennings gravely warned 
that ―The Dukes are a little out of their picture when it comes to breakin‘ in the big city (Blake 
2002: 1). The boys were not particularly well educated or, for that matter, holders of steady jobs. 
Neither trait made them out of place in Hazzard, according to critic Ted Blake, who observed 
that ―to find someone whose occupation and speech indicate that they have had the benefit of a 
college education, viewers must stick to the random background characters that occasionally 
materialize to fill the support roles that some scripts require‖ (Blake 2002: 1). Hazzard County 
was, in true southern form, almost completely lacking a middle class. Boss Hogg owned just 
about everything, and everyone else was either working class or poor.    
 As was traditionally the case on southern shows, Hazzard County was depicted as being 
isolated, and when an outsider did show up—con artists, counterfeiters, hijackers, mobsters, and, 
in one memorable episode, a space alien—it usually caused quite a ruckus. The Dukes of 
Hazzard also avoided the issue of race relations by the simple expedient of not having many 
black people in the cast. The most frequently seen black character was Sheriff Little of 
Chickasaw County, who would occasionally appear standing behind a roadblock, glowering out 
from behind his sunglasses, and hoping that whatever madness that was going on in the 
neighboring county would not spill over into his own. While Little was by no means a negative 
stereotype, it is a little curious that the show‘s most prominent black character was a menacing-
504 
 
looking authority figure, always seen peering in from the outside.  
 In summary, Hazzard County was a rural, unsophisticated, uneducated, poor, isolated and 
almost entirely white world—the very demographic that CBS had run away from in 1971. To 
make matters worse, The Dukes of Hazzard was hardly the same sort of ―prestige project‖ that 
had led the network to green light The Waltons. The network was concerned, and had reason to 
be, as noted by Tim Hollis:             
The network was leery of putting the show on at all, especially 
since several officials still in power remembered smarting from the 
―Country Broadcasting System‖ appellation. Their worst fears 
were realized when the first reviews came out . . . . TV Guide 
branded the show ―moron heaven,‖ and a writer for one of the Los 
Angeles paper spewed his venom in more detail: ―The worst thing 
to happen to the South since Appomattox,‖ he declared. ―Video 
historians may well study it as an astounding example of how to 
fill an hour of prime time with no visible signs of acting, writing, 
or direction‖ . . . . The critics were fond of pointing out that the 
show embodied every previous stereotype of southern/rural 
character in existence (Hollis 2008: 238-239).  
 
 In defense of CBS, if a defense is necessary, the network did not appear to have much 
faith in The Dukes. Its initial order was for a scant eight episodes, and the show made an 
unheralded debut as a winter replacement for Wonder Woman. The network likely felt compelled 
to at least make an attempt, even if it was half-hearted, to cash in on the country-flavored car 
chase craze of the late 1970s, exemplified by the blockbuster Burt Reynolds action comedy film, 
Smokey and the Bandit. Success came immediately. Despite its short initial run, The Dukes of 
Hazzard ranked twentieth in the Nielsen ratings at the conclusion of the 1978-1979 season. It 
rose to the ninth position during its first full season, and rocketed to the second spot during 1980-
1981, trailing only the smash hit Dallas, which followed The Dukes on CBS‘s Friday night 
505 
 
schedule. Ultimately, the show would rank in the Nielsen top ten for three seasons, and in the top 
thirty five times during its six-year run.    
 Clearly, viewers saw something in the show that the critics did not.While vilification of 
the show‘s writing was certainly warranted—no one would mistake dialogue from a Dukes 
episode for that of an Oscar Wilde play—the characters obviously clicked with the audience. No 
small part of the show‘s success was due to actor Sorrell Booke, who played Boss Hogg. Booke 
and Denver Pyle were the only actors to appear in every single episode, and it is arguable that the 
show was really about the contrast between the greedy, blustery Hogg and the wise, earthy Uncle 
Jesse. Booke turned Hogg into a classic comic villain, an impressive waistline reflecting the 
character‘s avarice, and a short stature mirroring his pettifoggery. Hogg was truly a nasty guy, 
cruising about Hazzard County in a chauffeured Cadillac Coupe de Ville, bullying his stooge 
deputies, and trying to find, in every episode, some way to toss the Dukes in jail or pad his bank 
account. In varying episodes, he tried to shut down an orphanage and turn it into a shopping 
center, to appropriate a million dollars that had been slated for destruction by the Treasury 
Department, to steal Stonewall Jackson‘s sword and sell it for a profit, and to buy a tank to be 
used as a war memorial to himself and other, ―less important heroic veterans of Hazzard County‖ 
(Tropiano 2000: 77).  
 Critic Leigh H. Edwards argued that the immensity of Hogg‘s egotism and greed was key 
to the show‘s central theme, that of ―populist resistance to the Man, or the Boss:‖ 
The first hint is Waylon Jennings‘s role as balladeer/narrator; his 
famous theme song was part of the Outlaw country movement. The 
song tells us the boys are like ―modern-day Robin Hoods,‖ fighting 
bad police and big business, sticking up for the small fry farmer. 
Like Flannery O‘Connor's story, ―Good Country People,‖ the 
series teaches that every time someone assumes the bumpkin is 
506 
 
stupid, he or she will get burned by a little country ingenuity 
(Edwards 2005a: 1).  
 
 Along with this attractively populist message, the show‘s producers boosted the show‘s 
appeal by refusing to use the increasingly objectionable term ―hillbilly‖ and by avoiding the 
region‘s more horrific images, such as those on display in the popular 1970s film Deliverance. 
While there is no question that the Dukes were stereotypes of southerners, they were hardly cruel 
stereotypes. The Duke family was always portrayed as clean, polite, respectful, and proud. As 
the theme song suggested, they were just ―good ole boys, never meaning no harm‖ (Blake 2002: 
1).   
 Even if The Dukes of Hazzard contained elements that southerners might find 
objectionable, it is important to note that the show was clearly never meant to be taken seriously. 
The characters on the show were not just caricatures, but caricatures of caricatures. Leigh H. 
Edwards argued that the ―series had such a good time being ridiculous that it was often fun to tag 
along,‖ and that it provided ―raucously escapist entertainment,‖ ―cheerfully uncomplicated 
plotlines and cartoony characters.‖ The Dukes of Hazzard, wrote Edwards, ―is often great fun 
precisely because it‘s so absurd‖ (Edwards 2005a: 1). This sentiment was echoed by Lichter, 
Lichter, and Rothman, who wrote that ―Hogg‘s weekly schemes and fulminations against the 
Duke boys were like Wile E. Coyote‘s futile attempts to catch the Road Runner‖ (Lichter, 
Licther, and Rothman 1991: 265). In other words, accepting The Dukes of Hazzard as a serious 
attempt to realistically capture the South‘s geography is akin to accepting the road runner and 
coyote cartoons as a nature documentary.  
 The Dukes of Hazzard ended its run in 1985, largely as result of contract dispute between 
507 
 
the network and the show‘s stars, but its popularity endured. Ben Jones, who played the Duke‘s 
fun-loving grease monkey pal Cooter, parlayed his fame from the show into a run as a two-term 
U. S. Congressman from Georgia. In 1996, when the Nashville Network began airing reruns of 
the The Dukes, it regularly outdrew competition on the far more hip MTV network among the 
desirable eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old demographic. In 2005, the series was released on 
DVD, and a new theatrical version of the show, with a new cast, did well at the box office. A 
video game based on the General Lee was also released, and cable‘s CMT network reran 
episodes of The Dukes each weeknight, also offering a promotional sweepstakes where one lucky 
viewer could become the Vice President of the CMT Dukes of Hazzard Institute, a one-year, 
$100,000 position.    
CBS was not the only network in the 1970s to cash in on the genre popularized by such 
movies as Smokey and the Bandit. Film aficionados will remember that Bandit featured not only 
a fast car, but also a big truck. In February, 1979, two weeks after the debut of The Dukes, NBC 
unveiled B. J. and the Bear, the story of a handsome young trucker who travelled around the 
country with his pet chimp (yes, his pet chimp), Bear. Critic Jeff Alexander described some of 
the show‘s peculiarities:   
That show‘s theme song included the line ―best of all I don‘t pay 
property tax,‖ which indicated that B. J. was, to all intents and 
purposes, homeless . . . . Yet he still somehow managed to get 
enough loads hauled from one place to another to be able to afford 
spending long periods of time relaxing and/or brawling in 
America‘s one truck stop (Alexander 2008: 156). 
 
The show contained numerous Hazzardesque elements. B. J. was based in rural Georgia, 
where car chases, corrupt and moronic local sheriffs, and beautiful women abounded. It also 
508 
 
mirrored the populist theme of The Dukes, with a morally upright good ol‘ boy fighting corrupt 
government. In one episode, B. J. exposed a police captain who was dealing drugs and taking 
bribes, and on another he exposed a gubernatorial candidate who was running an illegal 
pornography operation. It is noteworthy that NBC, which had helped precipitate CBS‘s rural 
purge by promoting itself as America‘s erudite and urbane network, chose to air this show, 
because it was every bit as cornpone and perhaps even more ridiculous than The Dukes of 
Hazzard.  
 One of the sheriffs that B. J. encountered in his adventures was Elroy P. Lobo of rural 
Orly County, who proved popular enough to get his own show in the fall of 1979. Lobo was, as 
expected, a goofy comedy/adventure with plenty of car chases and scantily clad women, but with 
a twist that the bumbling lawman was now the protagonist. That is not to suggest that Lobo was 
any less corrupt than his Georgia predecessors. Though constantly trying to pull a con or a get-
rich-quick scheme, he was never successful. Elroy was essentially a harmless man who always 
managed, against his better judgment, to do the right thing. Helping out, if that term applies, 
were his blundering deputies, Perkins and Hawkins. The trio somehow always managed to catch 
the bad guys and eventually got called up to the big leagues. At the beginning of the second 
season, they had been assigned to a special police task force in Atlanta. The governor had 
ordered the move based on Orly County‘s remarkably low crime rates, not realizing that Lobo 
had simply neglected to report those statistics to the state. As might be expected, the Atlanta cops 
resented the presence of these three rubes, but they always managed to get the job done on the 
mean streets of the big city. 
 The Lobo formula did not change much when the show arrived in Atlanta, but the move 
did mark a significant shift in Georgia‘s television landscape. B .J. and the Bear departed 
509 
 
Georgia for Los Angeles in 1981, the same year Lobo was cancelled, and The Dukes of Hazzard 
left the air in 1985. Thirteen more Georgia-based shows would make their debuts over the next 
two decades, and all but two of them would be set in Atlanta.  
 If, in the minds of many television viewers, Georgia was a state dominated by the likes of 
Bo and Luke Duke, Boss Hogg, and Elroy Lobo, that perception was likely altered by the 
emergence of the Atlanta‘s Cable News Network. This twenty-four hour news outlet, founded by 
Ted Turner, travelled a rocky road to respectability. Dismissed in its early years by the major 
networks as the ―Chicken Noodle Network,‖ CNN did struggle for legitimacy, and at one point 
had to take legal action in order to gain access to White House press briefings. But as Brooks and 
Marsh put it, ―no one is laughing anymore‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 205). The network gained 
momentum throughout its first decade and cemented its place as a leading news outlet with its 
revolutionary, nonstop, frontline coverage of the Gulf War in 1991. CNN is now available in 93 
million American homes and in ninety countries around the world, and must be credited, for 
better or worse, with inspiring the rash of cable news networks that have evolved over the last 
two decades. It probably must also be credited for changing the image of Atlanta from that of a 
sleepy, provincial center to a city of national importance.     
 On the fictional frontlines, just two Atlanta-based programs emerged during the 1980s, 
but both experienced ratings success and respectably long runs. Matlock, a program featuring 
Andy Griffith as the title lawyer, premiered in 1986 and ran for nine seasons. This show was in 
the Nielsen top thirty for six of those years, including its first five, peaking in the twelfth spot 
during its third season. Designing Women, a sitcom about Sugarbakers, an Atlanta interior design 
firm run by four women, premiered a few days after Matlock and ran for seven seasons. It was in 
the Nielsen top thirty for three of those years, peaking in the sixth position during the 1991-1992 
510 
 
season.  
 These two Atlanta programs arrived a little more than a year after The Dukes of Hazzard 
was shut down, and recast Georgia as home to smart and sophisticated professionals. Granted, a 
few rustic touches persisted. Matlock was regularly seen strumming a banjo on the porch of his 
old stone farmhouse in Willow Springs, and several times Griffith‘s old sidekick, Don Knotts, 
would show up, playing Les Calhoun, Matlock‘s neighbor. ―Mayberry,‖ as Brooks and Marsh 
put it, ―was not far away, in spirit at least‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 867). For the first several 
seasons, principal interior filming for Matlock was done in California, but production of the 
show eventually moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, largely the result of Griffith‘s desire to 
be near his home on Roanoke Island.  
 Designing Women also possessed a distinct regional flavor. The opening credits featured 
a traditional rendition of ―Georgia on My Mind,‖ and the exterior establishing shots were also 
authentically southern, although they were filmed in Little Rock, not Atlanta. The show 
possessed its own rustic touches—one character owned a pet pig named Noel—but neither the 
four Designing Women nor Matlock were rubes. Ben Matlock might have been polite and 
unpretentious, but he was also a shrewd, Harvard-educated defense attorney, one of the best in 
Atlanta, and he almost never lost a case. Helping Ben out was his daughter, Charlene, who was 
also a lawyer. Her presence represented a shift in the portrayal of Georgia women who, prior to 
1986, had primarily served as set decoration, poured into one skimpy costume or another.  
 The shift in female portrayals was, of course, even more distinct on Designing Women. 
Sugarbakers was run by a pair of sisters: widowed Julia, the leader of the bunch, and her 
divorced younger sister, Suzanne. Their partner, Mary Jo Shivley, was an energetic, if somewhat 
511 
 
insecure, divorcee and mother of two. Charlene Frazier, the firm‘s kind and ingenuous business 
manager, had never been married. The show signaled the arrival of a New South on television, if 
for no other reason than it focused on women who were single, accomplished, outspoken, urban 
professionals. In many ways, Designing Women was a southern take on The Mary Tyler Moore 
Show. Just as Mary Richards had balanced the independence and determination of modern 
womanhood with the courtesy and decency demanded of her small-town Midwestern upbringing, 
the four Designing Women combined intelligence and resolve with the grace and civility of 
southern culture. It is likely coincidental, but incredibly appropriate, that the first names of the 
actresses who played the Sugarbaker sisters were Delta and Dixie, as they, in particular, 
represented the show‘s sharpest geographic themes. Julia Sugarbaker, played by Dixie Carter, 
had all the characteristics that one might associate with the aristocracy of the Old South. She was 
tasteful, graceful, and polite, but no hothouse orchid. She was bright and liberated and could be 
forceful and sharp-tongued when needed. Her sister, Suzanne, was more the Southern belle 
archetype, and was played by Delta Burke, who bore more than a slight resemblance to Vivien 
Leigh‘s Scarlett O‘Hara. A former beauty queen, she was flirtatious, ostentatious, and far more 
likely to employ physical charms than intellect. Like Scarlett, however, she was no weakling, 
and she usually got what she wanted, as evidenced by sizable alimony checks she was collecting 
from three wealthy exhusbands.                     
Designing Women was also notable for its willingness to tackle current social and 
political issues, something that even premier southern programs like The Andy Griffith Show and 
The Waltons rarely did. Critic Stephen Tropiano credited the show‘s creator, Linda Bloodworth-
Thomason, for this approach and for illustrating in the ―daily challenges women face in a 
patriarchal society:‖ 
512 
 
Instead of generic plot twists or physical humor that dominated 
female buddy series like I Love Lucy and Laverne & Shirley, the 
characters here express their opinions . . . . In ―Reservation for 
Eight,‖ the women and their respective male companions have 
plenty to say about the opposite sex . . . . The women observe that 
men don‘t listen, aren‘t sensitive enough, and are ego-driven; the 
men say women are manipulative and overanalyze everything. As 
always, outspoken Julia has the last word. Tired of women being 
blamed for all of the world‘s ills, she reminds the men that they are 
the ones who ―have done the raping and the robbing and the killing 
and the war-mongering for the last two thousand years . . . . So, if 
the world isn't quite what you had in mind, you have only 
yourselves to thank!‖ . . . . The show was also the first sitcom to 
take on homophobia and AIDS . . . . The women are asked by a 
friend and fellow designer, Kendall Dobbs, who is dying of AIDS, 
to ―design‖ his funeral . . . . When snooty friend, Alma Jean, tells 
Kendall pointblank that AIDS is ―God‘s punishment‖ of gays, Julia 
responds, without hesitation, ―Killing all the right people.‖ It‘s a 
gut-wrenching moment brought to a satisfactory conclusion when 
Julia kicks Alma Jean out of her house, but not before calling her a 
hypocrite and telling her that if ―God was giving out sexually 
transmitted disease to people as punishment for sinning, then you 
would be at the free clinic all the time! And so would the rest of 
us!‖ (Tropiano 2003c: 1).   
 
Both Matlock and Designing Women were also noteworthy for featuring recurring 
African-American characters and doing so in a matter-of-fact manner. Matlock included a 
character named Tyler Hudson, a black financial wizard who Matlock occasionally persuaded to 
do freelance investigating. Designing Women featured Anthony Bouvier, a black excon who the 
Sugarbakers initially employed as an assistant and handyman. Eventually, having worked his 
way through college, Anthony became a partner in the firm. As had first been the case on The 
Phil Silvers Show, the presence of these African-American characters was not a gimmick, nor 
was their appearance intended as an extraordinary development. They were simply there.  
513 
 
Beginning in the 1990s, four Atlanta-based programs would feature African-American 
leads, though none of them lasted especially long. The Royal Family was a 1991 sitcom featuring 
Redd Foxx as Al Royal, a crabby mailman who lived in Atlanta with his equally combative wife, 
Victoria. His dreams of retirement were upended when his daughter got a divorce and moved in, 
along with her three children. Unfortunately, Foxx died a few months into production, and so the 
show limped through its first and only season. The sitcom Arsenio, featuring comedian Arsenio 
Hall, lasted six weeks in 1997. It featured Hall as an Atlanta sports reporter and long-time 
bachelor who had finally settled down and married Vivian, an over-achieving attorney.  The 
talent/reality series R U the Girl with T-Boz & Chilli, which aired for two months during the 
summer of 2005, chronicled the efforts of the two title members of the hip-hop group TLC to 
find a replacement for their late band mate, Lisa ―Left Eye‖ Lopes. The finalists were taken to 
Atlanta where they lived in a mansion in between competitions. Class of 3000, a cheerful cartoon 
that had a brief run on cable‘s Cartoon Network in 2006, featured André 3000 (André Benjamin 
of the Georgia-based hip hop duo Outkast) as Sunny Bridges, a musical superstar who gave up 
the ―money-grubbing music business rat race‖ to return home to Atlanta (Brooks and Marsh 
2007: 259). His biggest fan was Li‘l D, who persuaded him to become the band director at 
Atlanta‘s Westley School of Performing Arts.     
 Ten days after Matlock left the air, another Atlanta lawyer hit the airwaves. John 
Grisham‟s The Client, which was based on a 1993 novel and 1994 film of the same name, aired 
for the duration of the 1995-1996 season. The legal cases were considerably more disturbing 
than those on Matlock, and the featured attorney considerably more troubled. Reggie Love was a 
family lawyer who had just gone through a bitter divorce. She had moved in with her mother, 
and was struggling to overcome the alcoholism that had cost her custody of her children. 
514 
 
Meanwhile, she and her mother sheltered clients who needed a home while their cases were 
being resolved. This clientele had lives as messy as hers, including a young boy who had 
witnessed a murder, a crack addict whose children were being abused in a foster home, and a 
young African-American man who had been expelled from school for setting fire to the Georgia 
state flag.    
A similarly grim, but more successful crime drama, Profiler, premiered in 1996 and 
survived for four seasons. It was the story of forensic psychologist Samantha Waters, who had 
retired after a serial killer murdered her husband.  She wasn‘t retired for long, however, and was 
soon working for the F. B. I.‘s Atlanta-based Violent Crimes Task Force. Sam was sent to the 
scenes of grisly murders, where she proved remarkably adept at visualizing the crime from the 
point of view of both the killer and the victim. Sam‘s character had a few rustic touches—like 
Ben Matlock, she lived on a charming horse farm outside of the city—but her personality was 
akin to that of Julia Sugarbaker. She was smart, independent, and, in the words of critic Cynthia 
Fuchs, ―she didn‘t take shit:‖  
One of my favorite moments comes in the first episode, when she 
meets her cocky teammate John; he challenges her to come up with 
a ―theory‖ of the crime at hand. She doesn't miss a beat: ―You 
want a theory? You‘ve got Chinese food in your refrigerator, you 
like your women in heels, your scotch straight, and yourself 
definitely on top. But it‘s just a theory.‖ This shuts him up. And a 
couple of scenes later, you see John alone at home, watching a 
game on TV and eating Chinese food from the carton he had in his 
fridge (Fuchs 2003: 1).  
 
 As for the show‘s depiction of Atlanta, the occasional serial killer or deranged sniper did 
roam the city, but Sam‘s team also spent a lot of time on the road. A maniac, for example, was 
on the loose in Yosemite National Park, a string of seemingly random murders occurred in both 
515 
 
Boston and St. Louis, bomb blasts were rocking Pittsburgh, and a serial rapist was terrorizing the 
Florida Panhandle. In other words, Profiler characterized Atlanta as no more dangerous than 
anyplace else. Perhaps the most distinct geographic message of the show was that Atlanta was 
evolving into a diverse and cosmopolitan city. Sam‘s team included Nathan, a black detective, 
and Grace, a Latina forensics expert. As had been the case on Designing Women and Matlock, 
Nathan and Grace were presented as unremarkable facts, as was the case with computer expert 
George, whose ―gay partner shows up at the office partway through the season and no one blinks 
an eye‖ (Fuchs 2003: 1).     
Indeed, most of the characters who populated Atlanta-based programs after 1986—Ben 
Matlock, Julia Sugarbaker, Sunny Bridges, and Samantha Waters—reflect a city that was 
progressive, sophisticated, and generally white collar. Georgia, it appeared, had left Orly and 
Hazzard counties far behind. In recent years, however, a small redneck Renaissance has 
emanated from the Peach State, as evidenced by the renewed popularity of The Dukes of 
Hazzard. In terms of new programs, the charge was led by stand-up comic and Atlanta native 
Jeff Foxworthy. Foxworthy was a specialist in redneck humor, known for such pithy 
observations as, ―If someone takes his dog for a walk and they both use the tree by the corner, he 
might be a redneck‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 694). His sitcom, The Jeff Foxworthy Show, had 
premiered on ABC in 1995 and was initially set in Indiana. When the series moved to NBC for 
its second season, the entire cast changed, with the exception of Jeff and his son, Matt. He had a 
new wife and a second son, and the setting was now Atlanta, where Jeff was the loading dock 
manager for a shipping company. Some of the show‘s developments might have made Georgia 
viewers uncomfortable—Brooks and Marsh noted, for example, that young Matt was ―somewhat 
dumber than he had been in Indiana‖—but the overall tone was a gentle family humor. The 
516 
 
comedy of the likable Foxworthy, while not exactly eradicating regional stereotypes, could 
hardly be considered a true cultural assault (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 694). 
Foxworthy‘s next effort raised a few more eyebrows. The sketch and stand-up comedy 
show Blue Collar TV, which featured Foxworthy and fellow comedians Dan ―Larry the Cable 
Guy‖ Whitney and Bill Engvall, premiered in July 2004 and ran for just over two years. Blue 
Collar TV was something of a latter-day Hee Haw, with country music and broad, goofy humor, 
including regular features such as ―The Redneck Dictionary Word of the Day‖ and ―The 
Redneck Yard of the Week Award.‖ As always, the degree to which this show could be 
considered offensive corresponded with the degree to which the viewer took it seriously, but 
critic Terry Sawyer loathed the program, particularly in the way that it co-opted the term ―blue 
collar‖: 
When I watched Blue Collar TV, I couldn‘t help but think of how 
homogenized images of ―working class‖ folks have become. Now, 
―blue collar‖ means white, Southern, alcoholic redneck. Blue 
Collar TV is a comic blight, a bastion of jokes well beyond their 
expiration date culled from e-mail forwards sent by the least funny 
of your coworkers. One typical skit involves a mulleted oaf asking 
his wife for the number to 9-1-1. She tells him to call information. 
He does. Somewhere the writers of Hee Haw sit, feeling literary 
(Sawyer 2004: 1).  
 
Blue Collar TV was taped at the Alliance Theater in Georgia, and was the second 
entertainment program to actually emanate from the city. The first had been Animal Tails, which 
premiered in 2003 and aired for three seasons. This show was, in part, educational, informing 
viewers about animals, especially pets. It was also a sort of talent search, featuring animals with 
unique abilities, some via tape from around the country, and others who ―performed‖ before a 
live studio audience in Atlanta.   
517 
 
As noted, Lobo‘s 1980 arrival in Atlanta began a period in which most Georgia-based 
programs were set in the city. Two subsequent programs, however, both dramas, were located 
elsewhere. The first, I‟ll Fly Away, was on location in Georgia and premiered in 1991. While 
some Georgia-based programs have been nearly devoid of African-American characters, a few, 
as mentioned, have featured either black supporting characters or predominantly African-
American casts. I‟ll Fly Away, however, was unique in this regard—it was the only Georgia-
based program to tackle the subject of race relations head on. Set in the fictional small town of 
Bryland during the 1950s, this well-intentioned drama chronicled the relationship between the 
white Bedford family and their black housekeeper, Lilly Harper. The head of the family, played 
by Sam Waterston, was Forrest Bedford, Bryland‘s quiet and gracious prosecuting attorney. The 
show often focused on Forrest‘s legal work, but it was also part family drama, featuring Forrest‘s 
relationship with his three young sons and Lilly‘s role as their surrogate mother. It was also a 
portrait of small-town southern life, and described a sense of place that can perhaps best be 
described as Faulknerian. Things moved slowly in Bryland, very slowly. The stories were subtle, 
the pace was deliberate, the atmosphere hypnotic, and the acting low key. Newsday critic Marvin 
Kitman, despite writing a rave review, admitted that watching Sam Waterston on the show was 
―like watching water drip‖ (Bogle 2001: 403). Beneath this sleepy surface, however, lurked the 
fury, discord, and psychological tumult that often characterized Yoknapatawpha County. The 
viewer learned that Forrest‘s wife was absent because she was in a mental institution, and 
Forrest‘s case load contained more than a few vicious crimes.      
The dominant topic, though, was quite obviously race, a point made clear by the names of 
Forrest Bedford and his son, Nathan, a not-too-subtle allusion to Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan 
Bedford Forrest. This is not to suggest that the I‟ll Fly Away characters embodied the spirit of 
518 
 
their infamous namesake, even though they were often disturbed and confused by the Civil 
Rights movement budding around him. Rather, Forrest has much more in common with Atticus 
Finch, the principled attorney from To Kill a Mockingbird who ultimately does the right thing 
despite the vehement disapproval of many of his fellow citizens. The Civil Rights movement was 
most directly examined through the eyes of Lilly. Like Forrest, she possessed a quiet dignity and 
intelligence, and had the courage to engage in courthouse sit-ins and voter registration drives. 
She was also able to reshape the perspective of the Bedford family, particularly through her 
interaction with the youngest boy, John Morgan Bedford, who ―asked wide-eyed questions about 
why the black people were different‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 657). In keeping with the show‘s 
subtle tone, these explorations of racial issues were handled in a thoughtful manner, as noted by 
critic Donald Bogle:  
Lilly always understood her place in Southern culture. Here I‟ll Fly 
Away dramatized a fact that most African Americans were aware 
of but had rarely seen articulated on the primetime series in such 
thoughtful terms: that while Lilly becomes well aware of the 
Bedfords‘ conflicts and contradictions, their dilemmas and 
yearnings, they know very little about her, the Black woman in 
their midst. Lilly also sees the contrast between the Bedfords‘ 
comfortable middle-class way of life and her own. I‟ll Fly Away 
never let the viewer forget that once Lilly left the Bedford 
household, she returned to her modest home in the colored part of 
town (Bogle 2001: 398).  
 
I‟ll Fly Away was one of the most critically acclaimed programs of the 1990s. It won the 
Peabody Award, three Humanitas Awards, and received twenty-three Emmy nominations.  It 
also had an incredibly loyal following, but not a large enough one, and NBC cancelled the show 
midway through its second season. In a unique acknowledgment of the strong attachment that 
519 
 
many felt to I‟ll Fly Away, PBS produced a new, two-hour conclusion for the program‘s fans in 
1993. 
The second 1990s Georgia-based drama set outside of Atlanta was the over-heated 
primetime soap opera Savannah, which premiered in 1996. This show began when Lane 
MacKenzie, a sophisticated budding writer moved back home to Savannah from New York. 
There she rejoined two of her lifelong friends: Reese, a spoiled and childlike Southern belle, and 
Peyton, an immoral and devious harpy. Savannah was not very distant from Dallas in tone, and 
the show contained all the usual soap opera elements: piles of cash, cheating spouses, illegitimate 
children, con men and scam artists, prostitutes, crooked politicians, thieves, and long-lost 
identical twins. Fans of quality television who were heartbroken by the cancellation of I‟ll Fly 
Away might have taken some solace in the fact that Savannah was canned after six weeks.     
 
CONCLUSION 
Several cities outside of California and New York have contributed to primetime 
television programming, most notably Washington, Philadelphia, and Chicago, but none of them 
have been as prolific, at least in recent years, as Nashville. The irony, of course, is that although 
Nashville is one of television‘s most prominent urban areas, the images from the city have been 
decidedly nonurban. Nashville produced scores of country music programs for network 
broadcast and syndication and even lent its name, for a time, to a prominent cable network. Most 
of this programming owed a stylistic debt to the long-running country variety program Hee Haw. 
The production value of that show was high and the musical talent remarkable, but it is probably 
best remembered for its goofy and determinedly unsophisticated humor. Images of the corpulent, 
520 
 
slow-witted Junior Samples, bad jokes told from a cornfield or from haystacks, and a braying 
cartoon donkey are recalled affectionately by some and with disgust by others, but they were 
certainly out of step with Nashville‘s older reputation as the Athens of the South. Such images 
were, nevertheless, a step up from the images of Tennessee provided by scripted entries set 
outside of Nashville. Most of these programs were short-lived, detailing life in rural backwaters 
that were sometimes violent, sometimes impoverished, and nearly always culturally backward. 
The sleepy small town has been, without doubt, the most common television image of the 
South. Mayberry, North Carolina, of The Andy Griffith Show is probably television‘s most 
famous fictional locale, and it was, in many ways, the epitome of the southern television 
landscape. The show is undoubtedly the South‘s most enduringly popular show, and was one of 
the most positive depictions of the region. Life moved slowly, and the people were generally 
cheerful, warm, sincere, and friendly. Family, tradition, and community mattered, and although 
the inhabitants were decidedly unsophisticated, any outsider, whether coming with nefarious 
motives or simply ruffling feathers with their arrogance, nearly always left with a new 
appreciation for small-town ingenuity.    
The geographic messages of the South‘s small town programs have not been completely 
uniform, but the general portrait of an isolated, slow-moving, tradition-bound little town has 
been surprisingly consistent from state to state and decade to decade. The angles of South 
Carolina and West Virginia‘s lone shows were very different, but both programs made heavy use 
of their settings, with the serene beauty of Trinity, South Carolina, contrasting with the evil 
powers of American Gothic‘s antagonist, and rural West Virginia lending an air of folksy 
wisdom to the protagonist of Hawkins. Kentucky has been home to four short-lived programs 
and, for the most part, they have followed the lead of the state‘s first entry, The Wonderful John 
521 
 
Acton, by featuring themes rich in rural nostalgia. Arkansas‘s most prominent program, Evening 
Shade, was lauded for its spicy and smart humor, but its core geographic element was a sleepy 
amiability that dripped from the name of the title town. Things were not always so congenial on 
Mississippi‘s most successful program, In the Heat of the Night, with its emphasis on racial 
tension, cultural conflict, crime, and violence, but the overall geographic aura of its fictional 
Sparta was not much different from that of scores of other fictional southern towns—the people 
were polite, tradition mattered, everything moved slowly, and everyone knew everyone else.  
Alabama‘s prominent entry, Any Day Now, was set in the industrial city of Birmingham, 
but its tone was not much different from its small-town southern counterparts. Poverty, race, and 
racism were prominent topics, but the defining geographic elements of the show were its 
leisurely pace and the message that the present was entrenched firmly in the past. Likewise, the 
television landscape of Louisiana, the most urbanized (on television, at least) of the southern 
states, also presented the standard view of the South. New Orleans might have more than its 
share of corruption, but it also was a town rooted in its past and reveling in its colorfully cheerful 
idiosyncrasies. None of Louisiana‘s programs were particularly successful, but the critically 
acclaimed Frank‟s Place epitomized the state‘s television landscape. Its protagonist, as noted by 
Donald Bogle (2001), was drawn to New Orleans by its ―food, its music, its social clubs, its 
jazzy seductiveness,‖ and its ―romantic, almost dream-like aura.‖  
In the years since Mayberry left the air, a number of North Carolina programs have been 
set in modern urban areas, and even the state‘s fictional small-town shows became far more 
modern and turbulent. This shift from the Old South to the New has been chronicled throughout 
the region, but this transition has been most noticeable in Virginia and Georgia. For years, 
Virginia‘s television landscape was dominated by The Waltons, an acclaimed drama about a 
522 
 
loving family living in a rural community in 1930s. With its traditional values, bittersweet 
stories, and dignified, simple, and quietly intelligent characters, The Waltons has become 
synonymous with rural nostalgia and quality family television. Years after The Waltons left the 
air, Major Dad would echo these same sweet stories of loving families back, but, on balance, the 
state‘s television entries have become more modern and urban. Along with a soap opera and a 
pair of gritty crime dramas, Virginia has been home to the caustic social and political satire of 
the adult cartoon, American Dad. Although this show ultimately celebrates family love just as 
The Waltons did, American Dad is better known for its skewering of government and suburban 
conformity, and its incredibly bawdy humor.  
Georgia‘s television landscape has similarly followed the track from rural and traditional 
to urban and modern, but its early entries were more carefree, and considerably greasier than The 
Waltons. On Carter Country, B. J. and the Bear, and Lobo, cops and politicians were usually 
colorfully corrupt, the women scantily clad, and the heroes cheerfully laidback. The defining 
entry of Georgia‘s early years was The Dukes of Hazzard, which sent mixed messages about its 
rural Georgia setting. On one hand, the show featured spectacularly corrupt politicians and cops, 
and the plots, characters, and dialogue were lambasted for their decidedly low-brow nature. On 
the other hand, the title cousins were charming and polite, possessed a good deal of country 
ingenuity and, given their resistance to the devious establishment, were, in a way, populist 
heroes. 
Georgia‘s sleepy backwaters did not die with The Dukes of Hazzard, but remained 
something a constant among the state‘s television programs—played for laughs on The Jeff 
Foxworthy Show and Blue Collar TV, and earnestly examined on the civil rights drama I‟ll Fly 
Away. That said, Georgia‘s television landscape underwent a major transformation in the mid-
523 
 
1980s. The shows on the cusp between the Old South and the New South were Designing 
Women and Matlock. Both contained ingredients that tasted of an old and sleepy region, but they 
were also set in modern Atlanta, and presented characters far more sophisticated than their 
country cousins. The title protagonists of Designing Women were intelligent, accomplished, and 
outspoken women, and the title hero of Matlock was a respected, Harvard-educated attorney. 
Both shows were also notable for featuring black supporting characters, not as a comical 
gimmick or for a tedious examination of racial matters, but simply as a matter of course. 
Through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, Atlanta was home to several programs featuring black 
leads, and, in general, the city was increasingly depicted as a modern metropolis populated by 
progressive, sophisticated, and white-collar professionals. Georgia‘s transition from Old South to 
New was fully realized on Profiler, a crime drama that featured a strong female lead, and that 
depicted Atlanta as a fast-paced, cosmopolitan, and even somewhat dangerous metropolis.                  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
524 
 
TABLE 7. DEFINING PROGRAMS AND COMMON TRAITS: THE WEST 
State Defining Programs Key Program 
Elements 
Other Common 
Traits 
Arizona The Adventures of Rin 
Tin Tin 
The rough and rugged 
frontier; brave cavalry 
soldiers facing down 
outlaws and savage 
Native Americans 
Stern and noble 
heroes maintaining 
law and order on the 
wild frontier; violent 
action; mixture of 
pejorative and 
sympathetic views of 
Native Americans; 
Mexican-Americans; 
tough towns; corrupt 
land barons; hot, 
filthy, barren little 
towns; seedy Phoenix; 
white, wealthy, 
materialistic, 
dissatisfied urbanites 
 
Alice Friendly, blue-collar 
Phoenix; an 
independent, working 
single mom; ―love, 
comfort, down-to-
earth wisdom, and 
good humor‖; a fresh 
start out West 
Idaho The Manhunter Rural home of title 
character 
 
Colorado Dr. Quinn, Medicine 
Woman 
A doctor arrives on 
the rugged frontier to 
start a new life; battles 
ignorance and 
prejudice; heart-
warming family 
values 
A newcomer arrives 
for a fresh start; a 
newcomer fights the 
ignorance and 
prejudice of natives; 
an outsider arrives to 
exploit the local 
citizens and land; 
attractive but wild 
landscapes; toughness 
of primary characters; 
the mean streets of 
Denver; mixture of 
rustic small towns and 
modern urban life 
Dynasty Tumult, betrayal, and 
greed among 
Denver‘s super rich;   
Mork & Mindy An alien arrives on 
earth to learn lessons 
about human life; 
Boulder as a modern, 
pleasant city 
South Park A small, quaint, 
mountain town with 
eccentric, provincial, 
and narrow-minded 
residents who often 
meet with disasters; 
destructive outsiders  
525 
 
Montana My Friend Flicka Adventures of a boy 
and his horse on a 
19th-century ranch 
The wild, lawless, and 
uncivilized frontier; 
youthful vigor, 
optimism, and 
personal renewal 
Nevada Bonanza Tales of dignity, 
wisdom, integrity, 
reason, honesty, and 
rugged independence 
on a prosperous 
frontier ranch 
Las Vegas‘s gaming 
and entertainment 
industry; Money, 
glitz, glamor, sleaze, 
romance sex, violence 
and crime in ―Sin 
City‖; lavishly 
produced variety 
programs; staring life 
anew in the West; 
dusty, isolated little 
desert towns; eerie 
loneliness of the 
desert 
CSI: Crime Scene 
Investigation 
An enigmatic hero 
leads a team of 
talented and dedicated 
forensic scientists; 
―pithy observations 
about gambling and 
fate‖; strange and 
gruesome murders; 
wild night life 
Reno 911 Cartoonish portrayal 
of Reno as ―society‘s 
flabby underbelly‖ 
and as a town of 
―trailer parks, shabby 
bungalows, 
unintelligible perps 
and victims, sleazy 
street shots‖ 
New Mexico The Rifleman Rancher on a wild 
frontier whose skills 
as a rifleman help 
maintain law and 
order 
Lawmen maintain 
order on a wild and 
lawless frontier; 
relatively sympathetic 
portrayals of Native 
Americans; highly-
principled 
protagonists; Old 
West values in 
contemporary 
settings; Hispanic 
Americans  
Roswell Teen angst, 
government 
conspiracy, and space 
aliens 
526 
 
Oregon Little People, Big 
World 
A friendly, happy, and 
successful nuclear 
family  
Friendly, generally 
normal families with a 
gimmicky twist; the 
grim streets of 
Portland; a beautiful 
but harsh wilderness; 
Utah Donny & Marie Clean and good-
natured variety show; 
wholesome family 
entertainment  
Spectacular 
landscapes; old-timers 
vs. newcomers 
Washington Frasier Seattle as a modern 
metropolis where the 
sophisticated and 
pedantic collide with 
the earthy and crude 
Rough and tumble 
Seattle coming into 
contact with a 
civilizing force; dark 
themes; violence; 
picturesque but shady 
small towns; 
newcomers; 
conspiracies 
Grey‟s Anatomy Seattle as a city of 
handsome, successful 
young, hedonistic 
professionals; ethnic 
diversity   
Twin Peaks A charming, 
picturesque, and 
seemingly normal 
small mountain town 
that turns out to be an 
―eddying pool of 
sadism, Satanism, 
pornography and 
drugs‖; melancholy 
atmosphere; 
spectacular mountain 
scenery; the 
supernatural 
Wyoming Laramie A struggling ranch on 
a wild frontier 
plagued by outlaws, 
Indian raids, and 
corrupt land barons 
 
The Virginian A gritty, brusque, 
enigmatic, and 
nameless gunfighter 
maintains law and 
order on a 19th-
century ranch 
 
527 
 
CHAPTER 7 - THE WEST 
 
Programs set in the West have accounted for 6.37% of the American television 
landscape, although that number comes with a significant qualification. A number of programs in 
the western genre have not taken place in the states defined here as the West—most notably 
Kansas‘s Gunsmoke. Additionally, this study does not include an analysis of programs with a 
vaguely western setting—that is, programs where the setting‘s precise state or territory is not 
defined. Likewise, programs that might be defined as ―roving westerns,‖ where the setting 
changed weekly, such as Have Gun Will Travel, Wagon Train, and Maverick, have been 
excluded from this study. That said, while it is certain that the inclusion of such programs would 
have boosted the West‘s share of the television landscape above seven percent, it is unlikely that 
they would have put the region‘s share substantially higher than that. Images of the West have, 
of course, played an enormous role in many forms of American art, including film, radio drama, 
literature, music, and painting, and for a time, the western genre had a remarkable run on 
American television. That said, this genre was not quite as dominant on the small screen as one 
might expect. Few television westerns existed before 1957, and almost none after 1975. And 
despite the spectacular success of the genre in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the mortality rate 
of most television westerns was notoriously high. Of the 220 television programs to last at least 
six years, just eight were westerns, and Brooks and Marsh‘s list of the top 100 television 
programs of all time (as measured by both ratings and longevity) includes just five westerns.  
Even in the West, the dominant genre in many states has not been the western, a fact 
most evident in the region‘s leading television state, Nevada. It is true that Bonanza was the 
528 
 
state‘s most popular entry, but among its forty other television programs, just one was a western. 
Nevada‘s programs have accounted for 1.65% of the American television landscape, a figure that 
is nearly double the state‘s current share of the country‘s population. The state‘s impressive 
television exposure is partly due to the longevity of Bonanza, but also to the allure of Las Vegas, 
which has served as the setting for thirty-two programs. The distribution of the West‘s remaining 
television programs have, to a degree, approximated population distribution, with the region‘s 
three most populous states accounting for next three most successful television landscapes. 
Washington, Arizona, and Colorado collectively account for 5.8% of the country‘s population, 
and they collectively have yielded 3.19% of the country‘s television images. In proportion to 
their populations, the West‘s four least populous states have fared about as well. New Mexico, 
Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming collectively represent 1.59% of the U.S. population, and have 
shared about 1.06% of the television landscape. Idaho has fared the poorest among these four. 
Like Delaware, it can lay claim to only one short-lived program. Other busts include Utah, which 
has accounted for just 0.08% of the television landscape, and Oregon, which, despite its 
relatively large population, has accounted for just 0.39% of the country‘s television images.       
 
OREGON 
Oregon has served as the backdrop for thirteen television programs—an appropriate 
number given the state‘s generally unlucky run on the small screen. Things got off to an 
inauspicious start. The sitcom Hello, Larry is listed in some sources as the flop for which actor 
McLean Stevenson left the blockbuster series M*A*S*H. That is not true—it was the third of 
four sitcom bombs in Stevenson‘s post-M*A*S*H career—but it was certainly the most 
notorious. Hello, Larry was a midseason replacement series, debuting in January 1979, and it 
529 
 
initially had a relatively simple format. Larry Alder was a recently divorced radio talk-show host 
who had left Los Angeles for Portland with his two teenage daughters. The show focused on 
Larry‘s new job at station KLOW, where his goofy co-workers brought WKRP in Cincinnati to 
mind. Larry‘s radio show was a success, but Hello, Larry was not. Because NBC had high hopes 
for the show, it was renewed for a full season the next fall, but when ratings did not improve, the 
producers began pulling out all the stops. The show now focused on Larry‘s home life, featuring 
the coming-of-age struggles of daughters Ruthie and Diane, who were helped along by the sage 
advice of neighbor Leona, played by rhythm-and-blues legend Ruth Brown. Added to the fray 
that season were sitcom veteran Shelley Fabares, playing Marion, Larry‘s ex-wife who showed 
up seeking reconciliation; Henry, Larry‘s cantankerous father, who moved into the Alder 
household; and Harlem Globetrotter Meadowlark Lemon, who played himself as a family friend 
and the owner-operator of a Portland sporting goods store. In a novel move, NBC also tried to 
make Hello, Larry a retroactive spin-off of Diff‟rent Strokes, the far more popular sitcom that 
preceded Hello, Larry on Friday nights. Larry, it was explained, was Phillip Drummond‘s old 
army pal and, when Drummond bought Larry‘s radio station, several crossover episodes were 
necessary. None of this worked, and Hello, Larry‘s infamous run ended in April 1980.     
 Life in television Oregon did not change much in the years after Larry Alder‘s departure. 
Oregon has been depicted, for the most part, as a state of friendly, generally normal families 
whose lives are tilted off-center by some gimmicky twist. A number of these programs featured 
actors from once-successful television shows or popular films, but, like McLean Stevenson, none 
of them managed to hit pay dirt. Despite its legendarily disastrous run, Hello, Larry remains the 
only Oregon entry to air for more than one season on a major network.  
530 
 
 Hello, Larry was followed by three more sitcoms, all set in Portland. Together We Stand 
was a 1980s family sitcom featuring 1970s film icon Elliot Gould as David Randall. David had 
recently retired as a coach for the NBA‘s Portland Trail Blazers. He remained in town to run a 
sporting goods store (perhaps purchased from Meadowlark Lemon), but the show‘s primary 
focus was on home life. David and his wife, Lori, had adopted their daughter Amy sixteen years 
before. Two years later, they were surprised by the birth of Jack, the biological son they had been 
told they couldn‘t have. Seeing what good adoptive parents the Randalls made, a social worker 
persuaded them to adopt a Vietnamese orphan named Sam and an African-American orphan 
named Sally. Episodes revolved around David and Lori‘s adjustments to a suddenly crowded 
house, Lori and Jack‘s adjustments to new siblings, and Sam and Sally‘s adjustments to family 
life. Plenty of lessons about cultural differences emerged, but Together We Stand was lost in the 
wash of the decade‘s ―amalgam-family comedies,‖ and the show was put on hiatus after ten 
weeks in the fall of 1986 (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 1,400). When the show returned in February, 
Elliot Gould had departed, and the title had changed to Nothing is Easy. David, it seemed, had 
been killed in a car accident, and Lori was adjusting to life as a single mother. Proving its new 
title correct, Nothing is Easy vanished permanently after nine more weeks. 
 The 1994 sitcom The Boys are Back featured sitcom veterans Hal Linden (Barney Miller) 
and Suzanne Pleshette (The Bob Newhart Show) as Fred and Jackie Hansen, a Portland couple 
who were looking forward to a peaceful retirement after the youngest of their three sons headed 
off to college. Unfortunately, their older two boys came back. Son Mike had lost his job and 
moved in with his wife and three precocious kids, while son Rick returned after his wife kicked 
him out. ―There was,‖ according to Brooks and Marsh, ―a predictable uproar as these three 
531 
 
generations tried to live together‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 175). It was all a little too 
predictable, and the show was off the air after four and a half months.  
 Whereas the Hansens were a little overwhelmed by the sudden influx of family, the title 
character of the 1998 sitcom Maggie couldn‘t get the time of day from hers. Husband Mark was 
a workaholic cardiologist and daughter Amanda a self-absorbed brat, so Maggie sought solace in 
a new career. She studied veterinary medicine and got a job as an intern at the clinic of Dr. 
Richard Myers. Soon romantic sparks flew between Maggie and Dr. Myers, and she shared her 
conflicted feelings with her therapist, Dr. Kimberly, and her zany coworkers. Ratings for the 
show were low, even by the standards of cable‘s Lifetime network, and Maggie was canned after 
five months.    
 Like their sitcom counterparts, Oregon‘s seven dramas often featured fading television 
stars, depicted chaotic families, and found few viewers. The first was Blue Skies, which featured 
former Dukes of Hazzard star Tom Wopat as Frank Cobb, a successful San Francisco advertising 
man who gave up his career and returned to rural Oregon to rescue his family‘s struggling 
sawmill. He was a widower with two daughters, and had just married Annie, a sophisticated New 
Yorker who had a teen daughter of her own. Annie adjusted to life in tiny Eagle Falls, the kids 
adjusted to one another, and Frank argued with his father, Henry, who was disappointed that 
Frank had given up his career. Blue Skies lasted just eight weeks in the summer of 1988, a run 
that was equaled by 1991‘s Sons and Daughters. This second drama featured more family 
adjustments, and was perhaps most memorable for its slightly strange character names. Bing 
Hammersmith had recently returned to Portland with his young second wife, Mary Ruth, and 
their son, Bing, Jr. He moved in with his daughter, Tess, and her adopted Korean daughter, 
Astrid. Bing‘s other daughter, Patty, was married to a football coach named Spud Lincoln, and 
532 
 
they had three children—Rocky, a high school dropout and male model, troubled Paulette, and 
lovable little Ike. Bing‘s other son was yuppie Gary, who, along with wife Lindy, were adjusting 
to life with their new daughter, Dakota. Oregon‘s third dramatic entry, McKenna, featured yet 
more family adjustments. This time around the washed-up television star was Chad Everett, of 
Medical Center fame, who played Jack McKenna, the rough-and-tumble owner of McKenna 
Wilderness Outfitters. Jack had been in a funk ever since his favorite son, Guy, had plunged to 
his death in a gorge. He had to adjust to life with son Brick, who had come back home to Oregon 
after spending a few years as a race car driver. Jack, Brick, and the other members spent most of 
the series arguing and leading hapless city slickers into the wilderness. The main appeal was the 
spectacular scenery near Bend, Oregon, but it was not enough to save the show. After a two 
week run in the fall of 1994, McKenna returned to ABC the next summer to burn off its three 
remaining episodes. 
 Oregon‘s only police drama, Under Suspicion, was the story of Rose Phillips, the only 
female detective in her precinct in Portland. Rose battled sexism in the station house, but always 
found time to solve a series of gruesome murders. Under Suspicion was on the CBS schedule for 
eleven months, part of it in the illustrious 12:35-to-1:40 A.M. slot, but only eighteen episodes 
were produced. That was, nevertheless, good enough to make this show Oregon‘s longest-
running network drama.  
All three of the state‘s remaining dramatic entries were filmed in Canada and spent most 
of their runs airing on cut-rate television outlets. The first, The Fearing Mind, aired in 2000 on 
cable‘s Fox Family Channel. It was the story of a man named, of course, Bill Fearing, a horror 
writer with a vivid imagination. Bill lived in a small Oregon town, and the gimmick was that a 
mundane event in Bill‘s life would inspire a short story, which would then play out before Bill‘s 
533 
 
eyes. Nobody else, including Bill‘s grousing wife, daughter, and mother-in-law, saw these events 
take place. Not many viewers saw them, either, and the show was off the air in six weeks. The 
drama Mysterious Ways sought the same audience that The Fearing Mind had failed to reach. It 
was a cross between a church sermon and The X-Files, telling the story of anthropology 
professor Declan Dunn, who had miraculously survived an avalanche. Like Fox Mulder, Declan 
was seeking truth, much to the chagrin of his superiors such as the crusty dean at Northern 
Oregon University. Declan‘s research partner, a psychiatrist named Peggy, was the program‘s 
Dana Scully, playing the role of skeptic. As was the case on The X-Files, the physical proof of 
the miracles always slipped through their fingers. Mysterious Ways had a short run on NBC in 
the summer of 2000 before moving to the Christian-themed PAX network in the fall, where it ran 
for two full seasons. Oregon‘s last dramatic entry was Saved, which aired on cable‘s TNT. It was 
the story of Wyatt Cole, a troubled young paramedic who, against the wishes of his physician-
father, had dropped out of medical school. He was also battling a gambling addiction, and his 
girlfriend had recently ditched him. Otherwise, Saved was a ―by-the-numbers medical thriller,‖ 
following Wyatt and his fellow EMTs as they raced around the streets of Portland, dealing with 
―car wrecks, drug addicts, heart attacks, street crazies, and premature births‖ (Brooks and Marsh 
2007: 1,199). 
 Oregon was the setting for a pair of reality programs in the 2000s, the first of which was 
2005‘s Brat Camp. Considered by some to be educational, and by others as the epitome of reality 
trash, Brat Camp was the story of nine troubled teens, ages fourteen to seventeen, who had been 
dispatched to a reform school called SageWalk, near Bend. The kids, who had been signed up for 
the experience by their exasperated parents, were whisked away in something not unlike a 
kidnapping, and driven, blindfolded, to a sparse camp in the backwoods. If that experience was 
534 
 
not traumatic enough—one girl wept uncontrollably when she arrived—the ―students‖ were then 
handed forty-pound packs and taken on a forty-day, hundred-mile trek through the woods. Their 
guides were counselors with quasi-Native American names—―Glacier Mountain Wolf,‖ ―Flying 
Eagle,‖ ―Stalking Cougar,‖ ―Little Big Bear,‖ and ―Mountain Wind‖—who spouted trite 
proverbs.      
 That SageWalk‘s tactics were a little controversial goes without saying—the school 
received much unwanted attention four years later when one of their wards died on the walk—
but, for many, the most disturbing part of the process was that it was being put on television. 
―Adults can freely humiliate themselves however they wish on TV,‖ wrote critic Brian Lowry, 
―but the scales should tip differently when minors are involved‖ (Lowry 2005: 1). Brooks and 
Marsh outlined some of the show‘s more controversial elements:  
Needless to say, emotions ran high. The show played this to the 
hilt with teasers such as ―up next—Jada freaks out!,‖ ―dark secrets 
are revealed,‖ ―Lexie reveals her traumatic past‖ (the 17-year-old 
sobbingly revealed that she had been sexually abused in the 
seventh grade, as the camera zoomed in for a close-up of her tears). 
Brutally honest ―impact letters‖ from the parents added to the 
trauma. These were deeply troubled kids and some psychologists 
objected to their ―exploitation‖ for entertainment purposes, the lies 
they were told to get them to SageWalk, and the glib labels applied 
to them (onscreen labels such as ―angry punk,‖ ―compulsive liar,‖ 
and ―self-destructive drug-user‖ were routinely superimposed). 
Nor was the experiment entirely successful. At least two of the 
subjects, Jada and Isaiah, were in trouble with the law by the time 
the series aired (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 178).  
 
 Brat Camp ran for one summer and, along with McKenna, was as close as Oregon ever 
got to a western—highlighting both the beauty and harshness of the state‘s wilderness. The most 
common subject of Oregon‘s television entries, however, remained family life, and that was the 
central topic of Oregon‘s longest-running program, Little People, Big World, which debuted in 
535 
 
the spring of 2006. The show aired on cable‘s TLC (The Learning Channel), so it never achieved 
stellar ratings, but it did have a devoted following. The show‘s fans kept in on the air for four 
years, making it Oregon‘s longest-running program.  
 Like many Oregon television families, the Roloffs were a family with a twist. The dad 
was Matthew, a successful software engineer, and the mom was energetic Amy, a preschool 
teacher. They had four kids, including teenage fraternal twins Mark and Zach, daughter Molly, 
and younger son Jacob. The ―catch,‖ as the show‘s titled suggested, was that Matt, Amy, and 
Zach were little people (Mark, Molly, and Jacob were all of normal height). The show‘s gentle, 
cheerful atmosphere—it was a sort of reality show Waltons—was a far cry from that of the 
tawdry Brat Camp, as noted by critic Dan Kennedy:  
[The show] offers an up-close, unsentimental look at a family 
headed by a dwarf couple, spreading the positive message that 
little people can argue over money, coach youth soccer, and shoot 
tin cans off rocks like anyone else. . . . Little People, Big World is 
not exactly the stuff of high drama. In one episode, Amy and her 
daughter, Molly, who share a birthday, are dispatched on a hot-air 
balloon ride while Matt and the boys . . . are joined by family and 
friends to undertake a frenetic bathroom makeover as a surprise for 
Amy when she returns home. In another, Matt pushes Zach to pick 
up girls at a Little People of America gathering. These scenes are 
interspersed with interviews in which the Roloffs—primarily Matt, 
Amy, and Zach—expound on what it‘s like to live in a world built 
for people at least a foot taller than they are. Everyone is pleasant 
and articulate (Kennedy 2006: 1). 
       
While the Oregon of Little People, Big World was not necessarily action-packed, it was 
certainly attractive. The Roloffs were friendly, happy, and successful, and their home 
environment was quite literally the stuff of dreams. Because his dwarfism had required numerous 
surgeries, Matt spent a good deal of his childhood in a hospital bed, and his success as an adult 
536 
 
afforded him the ability to provide for his children all the experiences he had dreamed about as a 
child. He created Roloff Farms, a thirty-four acre pumpkin farm near Helvetia, about twenty 
miles northwest of Portland. The farm included, among other things, a soccer field, a lake 
(complete with its own pirate ship), a three-story tree house, Molly‘s full-sized medieval castle, 
an Old West ghost town, and a catapult for launching pumpkins. The atmosphere created by both 
the Roloffs and their farm was so inviting that many of the show‘s fans decided to break off a 
piece for themselves. After Little People, Big World premiered, thousands of fans descended on 
the farm, creating miles-long traffic jams near Helvetia, and doubtlessly driving up the price of 
pumpkins.   
 
NEVADA 
Nevada‘s first television entry, State Trooper, was one of a trio of popular four-wheeled 
westerns that were produced for syndication in the late 1950s, running concurrently with The 
Sheriff of Cochise, which was set in Arizona, and Highway Patrol, which took place in an 
unidentified western state. Here, Rod Blake, chief investigator for the Nevada State Police, tore 
around the state in his cruiser, chasing kidnappers, murderers, and other assorted bad guys. The 
show debuted in 1957 and remained in production until 1959, the same year that a new western 
literally burned Nevada onto the television map.  
The map in question outlined the territory of the Ponderosa Ranch, situated on the north 
shore of Lake Tahoe, just south of Carson City, Virginia City, and Reno. The map was a rather 
dull, sepia-tone affair, but as the dynamic theme song gathered steam, bright yellow letters shot 
into view, announcing the name of the program—Bonanza. The map then burst into flames, 
537 
 
revealing four men on horseback, riding before a spectacular western backdrop. Bonanza‘s debut 
on the television landscape was something akin to Dorothy‘s arrival in Oz, and if such a title 
sequence seemed a little ostentatious, it was intended to be. Bonanza was the first television 
western broadcast in color, and was developed with the aim of selling the color television sets 
that NBC‘s parent company, RCA, manufactured. The network clearly had high hopes for the 
show, and it did not disappoint.  
The four horsemen of Bonanza‘s credits were the Cartwrights, a family who owned and 
operated the sprawling Ponderosa ranch during Nevada‘s silver rush days of the 1860s. The 
father was Ben Cartwright, a widower of quiet dignity and wisdom, who had had three sons by 
three different wives. The eldest was Adam, Ben‘s heir apparent who, like his father, possessed a 
solemn and thoughtful demeanor. Eric ―Hoss‖ Cartwright, the gentle giant, was kind and 
trusting, and just a little slow-witted. The youngest son, Little Joe, was rambunctious and 
quixotic, with a quick temper that often got him into trouble. Bonanza was something of a 
precursor to the ―big-money‖ soap operas of the 1980s, often focusing on the trials and 
tribulations of running a massive business like the Ponderosa, but the Cartwrights did so with 
considerably more integrity than the characters of Dynasty or Dallas. Bonanza contained the 
expected dose of conventional action, but fit squarely into the adult western genre, concentrating 
as much on interpersonal relationships as it did on brawls and gunfights. Like Gunsmoke, 
Bonanza often dealt with serious contemporary issues in an Old West context, with Ben 
Cartwright ultimately serving as the voice of reason and honesty. As one critic put it, Bonanza 
was ―a new kind of thinking person‘s western, and the three holstered sons were forever being 
tortured by some ethical conflict that required a fireside chat presided over by Pa Cartwright‖ 
(Lewis and Stempel 1996: 120).       
538 
 
Although Bonanza offered a fresh take on an old genre, its geographic message was not 
much different from countless other westerns. The West was a tough place, and it took a tough 
man to survive and prosper there. Ben was that tough man, according to series creator David 
Dortort, who believed that the popularity of the show was due to Ben‘s rugged independence—
―He is not led around by the nose by anybody,‖ said Dortort (Lewis and Stempel 1996: 120). 
One of the show‘s writers, quoted by critic Steven D. Stark, believed the success owed 
something to its timing. In the tumultuous 1960s, it wasn‘t a sense of danger that drew viewers, 
but a sense of safety.  ―You know exactly what‘s going to happen in most Bonanza scripts,‖ said 
the writer, ―and in this uncertain world, stability is comfort devoutly to be sought‖ (Stark 1997: 
90). As was the case with Gunsmoke, some viewers found that the idealized world of Bonanza fit 
with a politically conservative philosophy of the world, with its focus on individualism, 
traditional family values, and noble actions of the wealthy. Pernell Roberts, who played Adam 
Cartwright before leaving the show in 1965, was considerably more cynical:    
Look at the setup of the show. Strange, man. The Ponderosa is a 
little kingdom of very rich people, with Ben Cartwright as absolute 
monarch. No women to speak of, three of the four men troubled as 
adolescents (Stark 1997: 90).  
 
Strange or not, viewers were enamored with Bonanza‘s world. The show put up mediocre 
numbers during its first year, but climbed to the seventeenth position in the Nielsen ratings its 
second season. After a move from Saturday to Sunday nights in its third year, the 1961-1962 
season, Bonanza shot to second place, beginning a remarkable run that placed it in the Nielsen 
top ten for a full decade, including nine years in the top five. For a three-season stretch beginning 
in 1964, Bonanza was the most-watched program on television, a feat exceeded only by six other 
shows, and just one drama—Bonanza‘s Kansas rival, Gunsmoke. The show was globally 
539 
 
popular, airing, at its peak, in eighty-six foreign countries and dubbed into twelve different 
languages. After years at or near the top of the ratings, Bonanza slid to the twentieth spot during 
the 1971-1972 season, and NBC moved it from Sunday to Tuesday nights in 1972, opposite the 
runaway hits Maude and Hawaii 5-0. That change, coupled with the unexpected death of series 
star Dan Blocker (Hoss), caused viewership to plummet. Bonanza ended its long run midway 
through its fourteenth season, ranking second only to Gunsmoke in terms of popularity and 
longevity in the western genre.  
Given Nevada‘s rugged scenery and equally rugged history, it is surprising that the state 
has been the setting for only two television westerns. That might be explained by Nevada‘s first 
entry in the genre being so colossal that there was simply no room for another. In fact, Nevada‘s 
only other western was a prequel to Bonanza. Set in 1849, when the Cartwright sons were young 
men, Ponderosa chronicled Ben‘s efforts to build a little 180 acre spread into the cattle empire it 
would become. Like its predecessor, Ponderosa examined serious contemporary themes through 
the lens of the Old West, but unlike Bonanza, not many people watched. The show debuted in 
2001, but its viewership was poor even for the little-watched PAX network, and it was cancelled 
after a one-year run.   
With the exception of Ponderosa, each of Nevada‘s thirty-nine post-Bonanza entries had 
contemporary settings. Las Vegas has been the dominant backdrop, serving as setting for thirty-
two of those programs. As might be expected, most of the Las Vegas entries have dealt with 
gaming and entertainment. Just six of the city‘s thirty-two entries have been sitcoms, and only 
one of those lasted more than a year. The only Vegas-based sitcom to feature a lead character not 
connected to the entertainment industry was The Tortellis, a spin-off of Cheers, in which Carla 
Tortelli‘s sleazeball exhusband Nick moved to Vegas to start a television repair business with his 
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slow-witted son, Anthony. The Tortellis was not able to brew the success of Cheers, and was off 
the air after four months in 1987.     
Along for the ride on that short-lived sitcom was Nick Tortelli‘s new wife, the statuesque 
and unbelievably dumb Loretta, who was trying to break into show business. She was not alone. 
All of Las Vegas‘s other sitcoms chronicled the ―off-campus‖ life of the industry‘s professionals 
and hopefuls. One early example was Blansky‟s Beauties, which aired for three months in 1977. 
The title character, Nancy Blanksy, produced stage shows at the Oasis Hotel, where her nephew 
Joey was a choreographer. Nancy, Joey, and all the showgirls from the Oasis lived in the same 
apartment complex, where Nancy struggled to keep order. Sharing an apartment with Nancy and 
Joey were two showgirls, Sunshine and Bambi, and Joey‘s understandably concupiscent little 
brother, Anthony. The next season brought the similar Who‟s Watching the Kids. The title kids 
were fifteen-year-old wiseguy Frankie (Scott Baio, who had played Anthony on Blansky‟s 
Beauties) and his somber little sister, Melissa. They shared an apartment with their older sisters, 
Angie and Stacy, who were showgirls. While they performed at a Las Vegas dive called the Club 
Sand Pile, they conned their neighbor, Larry Parnell, into watching the kids. Not many watched 
the show, however, and like Blansky‟s Beauties, Who‟s Watching the Kids was off the air in 
three months.  
Another showgirl sitcom, 2000‘s Nikki, was not a runaway success either, but its fifteen 
months on the air were enough to make it Las Vegas‘s longest-running sitcom. Early episodes 
featured a garish opening number from the fictional Golden Calf Casino, where Nikki White was 
a dancer. Her husband Dwight White was an aspiring professional wrestler, and they both were 
full of ambition. Life brought hurdles, of course. Dwight‘s wrestling career (where he was 
known as ―The Crybaby‖) was not going well, and the scuffling Golden Calf was eventually 
541 
 
seized by the I. R. S. and shut down. Nikki was forced to take a job at an auto parts store, and she 
and Dwight moved into an old bus parked on Dwight‘s manager‘s property.  
Although a number of sitcoms have featured characters who work, or want to work, in 
Vegas casinos, only one has focused on the inner workings of a real casino. Comedian and writer 
Bob Einstein‘s alter ego, the spectacularly unlucky stuntman ―Super‖ Dave Osborne, had 
appeared on a number of comedy shows, including his own long-running series on cable‘s 
Showtime network. On the sitcom Super Dave‟s Vegas Spectacular, which aired for six weeks in 
1994, Dave was the proprietor of the glamorous Rio hotel and casino, a position that he valued 
mainly for the opportunity to stage outlandish stunts. These, of course, invariably resulted in 
Dave and his crew being ―blown up, flattened, electrocuted or otherwise mangled‖ (Brooks and 
Marsh 2007: 1,353). 
The closest that any Las Vegas program has come to resembling a conventional family 
sitcom was the animated comedy Father of the Pride. The title father, Larry, was like many other 
sitcom dads. He was a hard worker with a bossy wife, a wacky best friend, a patronizing father-
in-law, an insolent teenage daughter, and an insecure young son. Unlike other sitcom dads, 
however, Larry was a lion. He and his family were part of the troop of animal performers kept in 
a private zoo by real-life Las Vegas showmen Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn. Despite a 
desirable Tuesday night timeslot, an excellent sitcom track record by actors John Goodman and 
Carl Reiner, and a lavish (and incredibly expensive) production provided by the feature 
animation hit-maker DreamWorks, Father of the Pride became the most notorious fiasco of the 
2004-2005 season. The show received mixed reviews, and the fact that Roy Horn had, in real 
life, been mauled by one of his tigers during a live performance the previous fall did not help the 
show‘s chances. Father of the Pride was cancelled after four low-rated months. 
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If the scarcity and unpopularity of Las Vegas-based sitcoms are any indication, then it is 
not comic relief that viewers expect from this city, but instead money, glamor, sex, and crime. 
Vegas-based dramas, which outnumber sitcoms nearly two to one, offer plenty of these 
diversions. The first in a long line of Las Vegas crime fighters was Dan Tanna of Vega$, which 
debuted in 1978. In the words of one critic, Vega$ was ―certainly not a thinking-man‘s detective 
show,‖ but it made up for in style what it lacked in substance (Martindale 1991: 488). Sporting a 
black leather jacket and blue jeans, the handsome Tanna was as quick with a droll remark as he 
was with his .44 Magnum. When not tearing up and down the Strip in a red ‗57 Thunderbird 
convertible, he was at the Desert Inn, the site of his apartment and office. He was assisted by 
(what else?) two sexy showgirls, the spacey Angie and the seen-it-all Beatrice. Bobby ―Binzer‖ 
Borso, a bumbling former con man, was Tanna‘s man on the street, and the suave Phillip Roth, 
owner of the Desert Inn and a number of other Vegas establishments, was Dan‘s primary 
employer. Exteriors for the show were shot on location, including scenes at Circus Circus, The 
Golden Nugget, and Caesar‘s Palace. With plenty of car chases, shoot-outs, and beautiful women 
on display before the neon-soaked backdrop, Vega$ became Nevada‘s first post-Bonanza 
program to crack the Nielsen top thirty, rising to the twenty-third position in its first season. The 
show‘s all-sizzle-and-no-steak approach wore thin quickly, apparently, and the show was 
cancelled after its third season.  
The Strip, a violent crime drama that debuted in 1999, channeled the spirit of Vega$ into 
a buddy show. Like Dan Tanna, Elvis Ford and Jessie Tanner were private detectives on retainer 
for a wealthy casino magnate. In this case it was Cameron Greene, the owner of Caesar‘s Palace, 
where much of the show was filmed. African-American Jessie was of the Dan Tanna mold, and 
his debonair smoothness stood in stark contrast to the slovenly, reckless Elvis, who lived in a 
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trailer park on a dry-docked sailboat named the Gonzo. Jessie and Elvis‘s investigations, which 
invariably led to shootouts and car chases, highlighted Vegas‘s seedier side. They stumbled 
across kidnappings, high-dollar heists, murders, and even a plot by the Japanese Yakuza mob to 
sell Vegas showgirls into white slavery. Such lurid goings-on were not enough to keep the show 
afloat, and The Strip was cancelled after nine episodes.  
The first Las Vegas-based show to feature crime fighters working in an official capacity 
was Crime Story, which moved to the desert from Chicago midway through its first season in 
1987, and returned for the duration of the 1987-1988 season. Having exposed the Windy City‘s 
seamier side, Crime Story presented an equally disreputable Sin City. The cops of the 1960s 
period piece had become federal investigators, tracking mobsters in Nevada. They not only 
examined gangland hits and mafia control of the casinos, but also child molestation, rape, 
kidnappings, prostitution, drug addiction, extortion, racism, money laundering, drug smuggling, 
and corrupt lawmen. Crime Story even included a memorable first season cliff-hanger where the 
key antagonist was nearly killed by an atomic bomb test in the Nevada desert.  
The city was still in dire need of policing decades later, as indicated by Nasty Boys, an 
action-filled crime drama about a group of vice cops working undercover on the flashy but mean 
streets of Las Vegas. It was, in many ways, standard cop show fare. Its ―typically TV-mixed 
team‖ included white Paul, Asian Jimmy, Latino Eduardo, African-American Alex, and grizzled 
veteran Lt. Krieger. (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 964). The catch? They were ninjas. Nasty Boys 
lasted five months in 1990.        
The second drama to feature the Las Vegas police department was far more successful. 
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation focused on forensic investigators who worked the graveyard 
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shift for the department‘s crime lab. A typical episode began with a gruesome crime followed by 
a scene in which the dispassionate investigators strolled, flashlights in hand, up to the site. Using 
the latest technology and their own well-honed instincts, the team would sift through the 
evidence, usually finding an intriguing bit of minutia that would help them track down the bad 
guys.  
CSI was an interesting mix of old and new. It had a splashy visual style and plenty of 
―gross-out‖ special effects that allowed viewers to see, up close and in color, the devastating 
effects the crime had had on the corpse in question. The show‘s gimmick was a series of black-
and-white cutaways, replaying the crime several times to demonstrate what might have happened 
based on each new bit of evidence. Like many other postmodern crime dramas, CSI often refused 
to provide closure for the audience—a number of the crimes went unsolved, and a lack of 
evidence occasionally allowed a suspect to walk, even when the investigators were convinced of 
his or her guilt. That said, CSI included other ingredients that linked it to its crime-fighting 
predecessors. Like The Untouchables or Dragnet, little attention was given to the personal lives 
of the taciturn team of cops. With the exception of a few subtle hints, the focus was always on 
the crime at hand. Like Hawaii 5-0 or Columbo, shootouts and car chases were rare, and most of 
the ―fun‖ revolved around watching the cagy detectives slowly put together pieces of the puzzle. 
Add in a fairly liberal dose of dark humor, and CBS had found, to its surprise, Nevada‘s biggest 
hit since Bonanza. 
 CSI premiered in 2000 on CBS‘s lightly watched Friday night schedule and put up 
incredibly strong numbers. That prompted a midseason move up against tough competition on 
Thursday night, where the show did even better.  It ranked eleventh in the Nielsen ratings its 
rookie season, jumped to the second spot in 2001-2002, and began a three-year run as 
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television‘s most-watched show the next season. CSI‘s spectacular success spawned not only the 
expected onslaught of imitators, but also its own franchise, including CSI: Miami and CSI: New 
York. It continued to air through 2010, and has never dropped below eleventh place on the 
Nielsen top charts. 
 The CSI team included Catherine Willows, a level-headed veteran; Warrick Brown, a 
street-wise investigator with sharp analytical skills; Sara Sidle and Nick Stokes, ambitious 
rookies; and Greg Sanders, an eccentric lab technician. Also seen frequently was the department 
brass, who was, in fact named Jim Brass. Some of the team members had Vegas-appropriate 
backgrounds—Warrick was struggling to overcome a gambling addiction, Catherine had worked 
her way through college as a stripper, and Greg was an adrenaline junkie, addicted to surfing, 
snowboarding, and punk rock. The show‘s primary character, at least in its early years, was Gil 
Grissom, the lead investigator. Grissom was a departure from previous Las Vegas television 
detectives. He was not a splashy lady‘s man, like Dan Tanna, or a hard-boiled gumshoe like 
Mike Torello of Crime Story. If anything, Grissom most closely resembled the quiet, determined 
hero of Gunsmoke. Like Matt Dillon, Gil Grissom was a strong believer in following the rules 
and adhering to a proper code of conduct, although Dillon‘s faith in law and order was replaced 
here by Grissom‘s unshakable faith in science. The most striking parallel between the two, 
though, was Grissom‘s devotion to his work. His personal life was always a matter of 
speculation, although the show suggested that he didn‘t have much of one. Like Dillon, Grissom 
was enigmatic, and deliberately so. In one episode, he let it slip to Warrick that he had once been 
a gambler. This surprised Warrick, given the many conversations the two had had about 
Warrick‘s own addiction. When he asked Grissom why he had never mentioned this fact before, 
Grissom replied, ―Same reason a good player hides his tells‖ (Fuchs 2002: 1).  
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 Still, it is doubtful that many viewers mistook CSI for a western. Although occasional 
side trips were taken to scrape a corpse off the desert floor, the show focused on its urban setting. 
Critic Cynthia Fuchs speculated that the show was set in Las Vegas so that Grissom could ―make 
pithy observations about gambling and fate‖ (Fuchs 2010a: 1). Certainly, more than a few crimes 
on the show were tied to the gaming industry and Vegas‘s famously wild night life—a world-
famous poker player was murdered at the Palms Hotel, for example, and a male stripper was 
found dead after a particularly exuberant bachelorette party.        
The influence of Las Vegas on CSI was more, however, than a collection of casino and 
hotel backdrops. The city also represented a state of mind. In addition to their Vegas-appropriate 
backgrounds, the characters on the show, who never seemed to sleep, exuded something like a 
gambler‘s high, ―addicted,‖ according to critic Stephen Kelly, ―to the adrenalin rush of cracking 
a case‖ (Kelly 2003a: 1). For the viewer, CSI constantly suggested that Las Vegas was a place 
where anything goes—where strange occurrences were par for the course. This message was 
reinforced by the matter-of-fact demeanor of the investigators as they wandered into some 
perfectly bizarre crime scenes—a man was found dead in the middle of the desert, and the 
autopsy revealed that he had drowned; a trainer was trampled to death by a horse aboard her 
private jet; and the corpse of cheerleader was found mutilated on a soccer field, her organs 
apparently having been eaten by her killer. Such unusual and horrific crimes were likely the 
result of creative necessity. Unlike many other police procedurals, CSI focused almost entirely 
on crime scenes and dead bodies, and since audiences were drawn to the show for the fun of 
seeing the team make sense out of something that was seemingly senseless, the crimes had to 
tend toward the unusual. The effect for the viewer, though, was to establish, or probably 
reinforce, the notion that Las Vegas was a city entirely deserving of its Sin City reputation. 
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While bodies piled up on the streets of Vegas, there was plenty of action going on inside. 
Six hotel/casino dramas aired during the 1990s and 2000s, and none of them took what could be 
called an unflinching, highly realistic look at life in the resort and gaming industry. Some of 
these programs had a somewhat downbeat tone, but all have generally depicted their respective 
casinos and hotels as part of the exciting and romantic Las Vegas of the American popular 
imagination. The first was Hearts Are Wild, a rip-off of The Love Boat that aired for two months 
in 1992. Like its maritime counterpart, it was essentially a lightweight anthology, with most of 
the action played out by guest stars at the fabulously posh Caesar‘s Palace. A considerably 
creepier variation on this theme was The Watcher, which aired for three months in 1995. The 
title voyeur was always in his luxury suite high atop the Desert Flower casino. From there he 
observed the activities of residents and visitors alike on a huge bank of surveillance monitors, 
occasionally commenting on their various scrapes.   
The premise of 2003‘s Lucky certainly suggested that it would offer a hard and gritty take 
on the seedier side of local life. The title protagonist, Lucky, was a charismatic gambler who had 
won a million dollars in the World Poker Championships. A year later, with all the money gone, 
Lucky‘s wife had committed suicide, and he was in Gamblers Anonymous. Lucky was not, 
however, a gambling version of The Lost Weekend, but rather a dark comedy populated by a 
parade of ―loveable junkies, loan sharks, and crooks‖ (Brooks 2007: 821). Lucky continued to 
gamble, and often win, but the show was cancelled after its unlucky thirteenth episode. The even 
less successful 2004 drama Dr. Vegas was an attempt to merge casino drama with medicine. It 
was the story of Dr. Billy Grant, who had given up life in an emergency room to become house 
doctor at the up-scale Metro hotel and casino. In addition to the expected Vegas glitz and 
romance, the show tackled hard issues like drug and alcohol addiction. Viewers apparently 
548 
 
preferred to keep their gambling and health care separate, however, and the show was cancelled 
after one month. The drama Tilt, which aired the following year, was a more conventional sleazy 
take on the world of Vegas casinos. It was the story of three professional gamblers: Miami, 
Clark, and Eddie. All three had been taken to the cleaners by a corrupt, arrogant card shark 
nicknamed the ―Matador,‖ and they were now looking for payback. The show aired on ESPN, 
the sports programming network that had begun to dabble in drama, and served as a nine-week 
commercial for the network‘s upcoming coverage of the World Series of Poker.  
The only genuinely successful industry drama was also its least substantive. Filmed, in 
part, on location, 2003‘s Las Vegas was Nevada‘s response to Dallas and Dynasty. Although it 
was not nearly as successful as its counterparts, it remained on NBC‘s schedule for five years, 
making it the city‘s second longest-running scripted entry. The setting was the sprawling, glitzy 
(and fictional) Montecito Resort and Casino, where a hard-boiled retired CIA agent named Ed 
Deline was security chief. Others in the cast included the colorful casino staff, Ed‘s angry wife, 
Jillian, and their vampish daughter, Delinda. Something treacherous was always happening at the 
Montecito, including ―robberies, murders, gambling cheats, bomb threats, sex in the elevators, 
and scams beyond counting‖ (Brooks 2007: 761). One of the primary antagonists was the 
domineering and manipulative Monica Mancuso who, having made a fortune by marrying an 
octogenarian billionaire, purchased the Montecito in 2005 and had it demolished and rebuilt. 
Monica‘s demise served as a clear indication of the overall tone of Las Vegas. In what Brooks 
and Marsh called ―one of TV‘s more memorable deaths,‖ a sudden gust of wind lifted her off the 
roof of the Montecito and carried her down the Strip, where she crashed through the window of a 
shoe store (Brooks 2007: 761). To honor her memory, the staff flushed her ashes down one of 
the hotel‘s toilets.  
549 
 
Critic Lesley Smith theorized that, ―If one sequestered a gang of adolescent males long 
enough without female company and with only a few word processors for distraction, they‘d 
sooner or later produce a script for Las Vegas‖ (Smith 2003: 1). That a show with such an 
obviously lowbrow approach would become one of the city‘s longest-running entries suggests 
much about what television viewers, or at least television producers, expect from Las Vegas. 
Whether they are watching Vega$ or Las Vegas, viewers are clearly not seeking out an 
intellectual challenge. As such, the city and state have provided a fertile breeding ground for the 
reality craze of the 2000s.     
A few reality programs have provided behind-the-scenes looks at Vegas‘s gaming and 
entertainment industry. The Casino, which aired for three months in the summer of 2004, 
followed the exploits of Tom Breitling and Tim Poster, a pair of dot-com millionaires who 
purchased the legendary Golden Nugget Casino in downtown Las Vegas. It had been struggling 
for years to compete with the new resorts on the Strip, and Tom and Tim were intent on restoring 
the Golden Nugget‘s luster. They were seen dealing with the gaming control board, managing 
the casino‘s 3,000 employees, hiring entertainment, and catering to high rollers and drunken frat 
boys. The 2005 reality entry Inked provided a similar backstage look at the Hart and Huntington 
Tattoo company, which was housed in the ritzy Palms Casino Resort. The same year, the Palms 
played host to Party @ The Palms, which featured high-spirited Playboy pin-up Jenny McCarthy 
chatting with guests around the pool, as well as hard-hitting looks at sex toys and lap dancing. 
The title subjects of 2007‘s Taquita and Kaui were ―happy, giggly girls,‖ both reality-show 
veterans, who moved into the Happy Inn in Las Vegas, where they ―horsed around, laughed, 
went on auditions, laughed, and took whatever entry-level acting jobs they could get‖ (Brooks 
and Marsh 2007: 1,357).   
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Taquita and Kaui came along a little too late to try their luck on Ed McMahon‟s Next Big 
Star, which aired during the 2001-2002 season. An updated version of McMahon‘s long-running 
Star Search, it was a lavish talent show where amateur singers, dancers, comedians, and models 
competed onstage at the MGM Grand Hotel. More established performers were featured on Oak 
Ridge Boys Live from Las Vegas, broadcast from the Vegas Hilton during the 1988-1989 season 
on The Nashville Network. Both shows suggested that nothing in Las Vegas is done on a modest 
scale, with Brooks and Marsh noting that the Oak Ridge Boys was ―glitzier than most TNN 
productions, with show girls, flashing strobe lights, [and] a huge audience‖ (Brooks and Marsh 
2007: 1006). Another extravagant pair of Las Vegas entries featured stunts that would have made 
Super Dave Osborne envious. I Dare You! The Ultimate Challenge, which aired for seven 
months in 2000, showcased monster truck jumps, sky-diving, and stunt planes, while 2005‘s 
Criss Angel, Mindfreak, followed the title Las Vegas magician as he prepared for and performed 
dangerous tricks, including one where he was run over by a Hummer SUV while lying on a bed 
of nails. Angel was seriously injured in that stunt, but he survived, and his show continued to air 
through 2010.    
Vegas would not be Vegas without a few game shows, the first of which Dealer‟s 
Choice. It was Nevada‘s first post-Bonanza entry, and actually the first television program based 
exclusively in Las Vegas. Dealer‟s Choice was taped at the Tropicana Hotel and Casino, with 
210 episodes produced for syndication in 1974 and 1975. The show featured variations on 
standard casino games like blackjack and roulette, and, according to Brooks and Marsh the 
―garish surroundings and the betting fever prevalent in Las Vegas helped add to the excitement‖ 
(Brooks and Marsh 2007: 339). A cascade of poker programs washed over American television 
in the 2000s, many of which included events taped in Las Vegas. Among them was Celebrity 
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Poker Showdown, with stars playing Texas Hold ‗Em for charity. The show premiered in 2003, 
and was taped at the Palms for three years before the action shifted to New Orleans.   
Although a few of Nevada‘s game shows strayed from conventional casino fare, even 
these exuded Vegas-style excitement and/or tastelessness. Race to the Altar, which aired for 
about three months in 2003, featured eight unmarried couples dashing about the city to win 
challenges, with the grand prize being a Las Vegas dream wedding. They stayed at the Venetian 
Hotel, where they ―bickered, plotted, and formed alliances‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 1128). The 
mercifully short-lived 2004 FOX entry Playing it Straight chronicled the efforts of Jackie, a 
young college student from Appleton, Wisconsin, to find her dream man. She was brought to the 
Sizzling Saddle Ranch in Elko, Nevada, where she was to choose from fourteen bachelors. 
Group activities and dates occurred each week, after which Jackie would eliminate two guys, 
with everything leading up to the big day for the ultimate choice. The catch was that half of the 
guys were straight and half of them gay. If Jackie picked a straight mate, they would split a 
million dollars, but if he was gay, he got all the money. The show was pulled after three 
episodes, but for those dying to know the outcome, leftover episodes were made available on the 
FOX website for a small fee (she picked a straight guy).  
A reality show spun off another reality show, 2007‘s Surreal Life: Fame Games, featured 
D-list celebrities living together and humiliating themselves for cash. Baywatch actress Traci 
Bingham narrowly edged out porn actor Ron Jeremy to win the $100,000 grand prize. The most 
successful of Nevada‘s reality/competition entries was The Ultimate Fighter, which debuted in 
2005 and continued to air through 2010. This show focused on mixed martial arts bouts and 
followed sixteen prospective fighters in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) league. 
Viewers also saw them train and live together in a large home outside of Las Vegas. One 
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Nevada-based reality program was neither a game show nor a behind-the-scenes look at the 
entertainment industry. It did, however, have both a competitive and theatrical air. King of Cars, 
which aired in 2006, followed the inner workings of Towbin Dodge, a large Las Vegas auto 
dealership whose garrulous owner, Josh ―Chop‖ Towbin, was known for his wild promotional 
campaigns.  
As mentioned, Las Vegas has dominated Nevada‘s post-Bonanza television landscape, 
with only six scripted programs being set outside of that city. The first of these was the 
syndicated sitcom She‟s the Sheriff, forty-eight episodes of which were produced from 1987 to 
1989. It was the story of Hildy Granger, a young widow with two children whose husband had 
been killed in the line of duty. The commissioner of fictional Lakes County appointed Hildy to 
her late husband‘s post, much to the chagrin of some of the male deputies. Lakes County, 
situated in the mountains near Lake Tahoe, occasionally hosted serious criminals, including a 
jewel thief and a mobster, but it was mainly a quiet beat, more reminiscent of Mayberry, North 
Carolina, than Las Vegas. Like The Andy Griffith Show, She‟s the Sheriff was as much a 
workplace and family comedy as it was a cop show, dealing with the Granger kids‘ growing 
pains, Hildy‘s reentry into the dating world, and the misadventures of her goofy deputies.   
While Hildy Granger channeled the spirit of Andy Taylor, 1994‘s Harts of the West 
resurrected the spirit of New Mexico‘s short-lived 1960 entry Guestward Ho! The protagonist, 
Dave Hart, had spent years selling women‘s underwear at a Chicago department store. After 
suffering a heart attack, he decided to follow in the footsteps of numerous other television 
protagonists and start a new life out west. Fulfilling his lifelong desire to be cowboy (his kids 
were named L‘Amour, Zane Grey, and John Wayne), Dave bought the Flying Tumbleweed, a 
dude ranch located just outside fictional Sholo, Nevada. Dave‘s wife and kids were not thrilled 
553 
 
about the move to the dusty little town, but a bigger problem was the ranch itself.  The Flying 
Tumbleweed was a complete mess. It seems that Dave had made his purchase based on a 
brochure from 1957 and its irritable old foreman, Jake, was not much help. Viewers apparently 
found the plot to be about as fresh as Dave‘s brochure, and despite the father-son star power of 
Beau and Lloyd Bridges (who played Dave and Jake, respectively), the show was cancelled after 
fifteen weeks.       
The goofy good nature of Harts of the West was an exception to the rule when it came to 
depicting life in the desert. Rural Nevada possessed the same kind of eerie loneliness that has 
characterized the television landscape of rural Washington, Kansas, and Maine. The first such 
indication of strangeness came in the science-fiction drama Seven Days, which debuted in 1998 
and ran for three seasons. This series chronicled attempts of a team to develop time-travel 
technology, and although the setting varied from week to week, the base of operations was a top-
secret government facility near Las Vegas. Things got stranger still in 2002‘s Push, Nevada, a 
little town that would have made a fine sister city to Washington‘s Twin Peaks. Buried deep in 
the desert, the town‘s primary employer was the Versailles Casino, which had been making some 
abnormally large payouts. That fact, coupled with a series of anonymous messages suggesting 
tax violations at the casino, drew mild-mannered I. R. S. agent Jim Prufrock to the scene. Jim 
discovered that the casino, and much of the town, was controlled by a shadowy organization 
called Watermark, L. L. C., which had a possible connection with top-secret government 
agencies. The locals warned Jim to mind his own business and witnesses started dropping dead, 
but the agent was determined to get to the bottom of it all. The real threat proved to be Nevada‘s 
own CSI, which clobbered Push in the ratings. It left the air after six weeks.       
554 
 
If shadowy government conspiracies were not enough to cast a pall over the Nevada 
desert, there were always giant, subterranean, man-eating worms. Tremors was a low-budget 
1990 film that had become a cult favorite, and it had been followed by three straight-to-video 
sequels. The television series of the same name lasted thirteen weeks in 2003. This series picked 
up where the movies left off, with residents of the tiny desert town of Perfection dealing not only 
with mutant creatures called graboids, shriekers, and assblasters, but also with greedy real estate 
developers and nefarious government officials. The Perfectionites were appropriately odd, 
including Burt, a heavily armed survivalist; Jodi, a tough-gal owner of the general store; 
Rosalita, a former Las Vegas showgirl turned rancher; Nancy, an aging hippie who made 
ceramic figurines of the monsters; and Tyler, a newcomer who wondered why anyone lived 
there.    
Reno‘s television landscape was not quite as treacherous as Nevada‘s small towns, but it 
was every bit as bizarre. In its single television entry, Reno was home to what was perhaps the 
most inept and unsavory crew of crime fighters ever seen on television. Reno 911!, a wild send-
up of Cops, debuted on Comedy Central in 2003 and ran for seven years, making it Nevada‘s 
longest-running comedy by a wide margin. Like its inspiration, Reno was shot with hand-held 
cameras, followed officers around the station house and out in the field, and featured off-the-cuff 
interviews. The leader was Lt. Jim Dangle, who always wore disturbingly short shorts as part of 
his uniform. Dangle was about as bad at performing his official duties as he was at masking his 
bisexuality. Still, he was a better officer than his six subordinates. The men included James 
Garcia, an angry Mexican-American who hated immigrants; Jonesy, a laconic black man who 
moonlighted as a stripper; and Travis Junior, a dimwitted redneck who always wore a Kevlar 
vest on the outside of his uniform. Reno‘s female deputies included the loud and vain Raineesha 
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Williams; Clementine Johnson, an unrepentant stoner and nymphomaniac; and Trudy Weigel, 
whose sweet and innocent disposition masked her racism and profound emotional problems.              
 To say that Reno 911 was uncharitable to its setting is an understatement. Travel writer 
Jayne Clark described the city of the show as ―society‘s flabby underbelly,‖ and, after noting that 
little actual filming took place in Reno itself, added that ―if there were, given the skanky locales 
portrayed, it probably wouldn‘t make you want to visit (Clark 2009: 1). Critic Laurel Harris 
concurred, describing the show‘s setting as a ―distinctly ratty, unromantic, and dull‖ being filled 
with ―trailer parks and shabby bungalows,‖ as well as ―unintelligible perps and victims, sleazy 
street shots, and alternately arrogant and underconfident‖ police officers (Harris 2003: 1).  
 Just as Vega$ and CSI used Las Vegas‘s gambling, drugs, and sex to dramatic effect, 
Reno 911 played similar offerings for laughs. The officers made many calls to parties, bars, strip 
clubs, and brothels, but unlike their more serious Las Vegas counterparts, who would shake their 
heads at society‘s ills, the Reno deputies would, as often as not, join right in. That said, the show 
would not have been the same had it been set in Las Vegas. The geography of Reno 911 was 
similar to that of St. Louis‘s The John Larroquette Show, Scranton‘s The Office, or WKRP in 
Cincinnati, with the second-banana status of the setting used to underscore the second-banana 
status of the characters. That formula was evident in an ―interview‖ with Deputy Clementine 
Johnson, the aging, rock and roll groupie, in the pilot episode:      
I love Reno. I‘ve got roots here. I‘m very popular here . . . . I‘ve 
done a lot of RV shows, all the camper shows—they always call 
me. As it turns out, I‘m one of the better-looking women here 
(Comedy Central 2004).  
 
556 
 
The combination of the city‘s moderate size and unusual reputation was integral to Reno 
911‘s artistic success, according to critic Lee Siegel, who argued that the show ―could only have 
been set in Reno, Nevada:‖  
Big cities are too dangerous for comedies about police 
incompetence; putting bumbling cops in a small town is 
disrespectful; and setting them down in a suburb would be just 
plain boring. Reno is just right: the stuff of small legend; sort of 
artificial in a vaguely Vegas kind of way. Reno is one of those 
places you think you know without ever having been there or 
wanting to go. So the show‘s creators found a real town with a 
semi-fabled environment, a setting for a satire on murder and 
various kinds of violence and crime that wasn‘t going to stimulate 
comedy-obstructing thoughts or feelings. In one episode, you see 
the chalk silhouettes of murder victims drawn in the most 
improbable positions—sitting against a building, lying on the 
sidewalk with one arm neatly drawn down the side of the curb and 
then perpendicularly sticking out onto the street—and you think, 
this could only happen in this place, and you laugh (Siegel 2007: 
27-28). 
 
While many of Reno‘s residents may not have been laughing, it appears that at least some 
were. When the show was cancelled by Comedy Central in 2009, local tourism officials launched 
a crusade to save the show, taking their case to Facebook, Twitter, and even their own website, 
SaveReno911.com. Michael Thomas, a director for the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors 
Authority, was one of those spearheading the campaign. He explained the city‘s unique 
relationship with Reno 911, and his comments were reminiscent of his Kansas counterpart in the 
wake of Married to the Kellys:     
Has it been uncomfortable at times for the city? Yes. But there‘s so 
much noise going on in the world, it‘s important to be part of the 
conversation. Besides, we have a sense of humor here. We don‘t 
mind being the brunt of a joke . . . . We‘re a departure from the 
norm. We think there‘s a lot of fodder here (Clark 2009: 1). 
557 
 
 
COLORADO 
Colorado‘s television entries have been relatively balanced in both setting and genre. Of 
the state‘s nineteen entries, twelve have been dramas, twelve have had contemporary settings, 
twelve have been set in small towns, and twelve have taken place in actual Colorado places. 
Seven of the state‘s programs have been comedies, seven had been period pieces, seven have 
been set in urban areas, and seven have taken place in fictional locales. A few distinct thematic 
patterns connect a number of the programs, a relatively consistent one being that of the 
newcomer who, in the spirit of Horace Greeley‘s famous exhortation, headed west to begin life 
anew. Televised Colorado‘s relationship with such outsiders has been a contradictory one. 
Sometimes the outsider has been cast in a positive light, as a noble soul who fought the 
ignorance and prejudice of natives. Other times, the outsider was the threat, bent on exploiting 
Colorado‘s upright citizens and spoiling its natural beauty. One near-constant in Colorado‘s 
television programs has been their love affair with the state‘s famous mountains. These are 
characterized as beautiful, but rugged and wild. Whether the setting is a frontier village or a 
contemporary city, a key underlying message has been the idea that one has to be tough to make 
it out west. 
Colorado‘s first entry was Hotel de Paree, a western that ran the 1959-1960 season. Set 
in Georgetown, Colorado, in the 1870s, the twist was that two of the primary characters were 
women, sisters Annette and Monique Denver. The Denver sisters did what nearly every gainfully 
employed female on television westerns did—they owned and operated the town‘s only hotel. 
They were attempting to bring Old World charm to the Old West, and the title hotel was a bit of 
opulence amid a wild and lawless frontier. To help keep things civilized, they enlisted the help of 
558 
 
a gunfighter named Sundance who had just been released from prison after a seventeen-year 
stretch. Quick with his fists, and even quicker with his pistol, Sundance was trying to get a new 
lease on life.      
Six more Colorado-based period pieces appeared over the next four decades, but few of 
them followed the standard guns-and-horses formula of other television westerns. Whispering 
Smith, which was set in 1870s Denver, was based loosely on both a 1948 Alan Ladd movie and 
the actual cases of a real-life police investigator. On television, Audie Murphy played the title 
character, who was the first to bring modern methods of criminology to the Old West. The 
novelty of the premise was not enough to draw many viewers, however, and the show was 
cancelled after four months in 1961. The western situation comedy Pistols „n‟ Petticoats 
followed in 1966. Its twist was that the person in the petticoat was also the one doing the 
shooting. Set in the 1870s, the show featured Henrietta Hanks, her daughter Lucy, and Grandma 
and Grandpa Hanks. They were a rugged family, so rugged, in fact, that they kept a pet wolf 
named Bowser. The members of the Hanks family, with the exception of poor Lucy who had 
grown up in the city, were all crack shots. Strong-willed Henrietta was constantly called on by 
hapless Sheriff Sikes to help subdue the numerous desperadoes who passed through the 
appropriately named fictional town of Wretched.           
Another appropriately named town, and another strong-willed female protagonist, arrived 
on the Colorado television landscape with the period drama Sara. Set in fictional frontier town of 
Independence in the 1870s, it was the story of Sara Yarnell, a determined school teacher who had 
―given up a dull, predictable existence in the East for the challenge of the West‖ (Brooks and 
Marsh 2007: 1,194). She was not the shy, retiring, schoolmarm the people of Independence had 
bargained for, of course, and she fought ignorance and intolerance for six months in 1976. The 
559 
 
sweeping mini-series Centennial, based on the James A. Michener novel, dealt with some of 
these issues, and many more, during its original run during the 1979-1980 season. Taking place 
from the late 1700s through the modern day, Centennial explored the lives of generations of 
Native Americans, farmers, ranchers, soldiers, and developers who sequentially populated the 
area that would become Centennial, Colorado. Like Sara, Centennial explored issues of 
prejudice, particularly in the relationship between the white men and the area‘s original Pawnee 
and Cheyenne inhabitants, but the core theme of the series was environmental. Michener himself 
was seen at the beginning of each installment, reminding viewers that ―their actions (and 
inactions) have an impact on the quality of life for future generations‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 
231).  
The combined efforts of Sara Yarnell and James Michener could not measure up to the 
civilizing force of Dr. Michaela Quinn, the protagonist of 1993‘s Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.  
Just as the people of Independence had been shocked by the assertiveness of their young 
schoolteacher on Sara, so, too, were the people of 1860s Colorado Springs when the doctor they 
hired turned out to be a woman. Following her father‘s death, Michaela had left Boston for a new 
life on the frontier. In addition to becoming surrogate mother to three orphaned children, she 
dealt with patients who had been bitten by poisonous snakes, attacked by rabid dogs, and mauled 
by the occasional mountain lion.  
Medical cases were not Michaela‘s only problems. The townspeople of Colorado Springs 
were wary of anything new, and downright distrustful of anything that smacked of science. In 
short, they were suspicious of everything Michaela stood for. During an outbreak of influenza, 
for example, Michaela urged that the sick be isolated from the healthy, patiently explaining that 
the disease was spread by a germ, to which a man snarled ―what the hell is a germ?‖ The greatest 
560 
 
problem, of course, was that this advice was being given by a woman. Despite her remarkable 
track record, the Coloradans of Dr. Quinn were always apprehensive about being treated. When 
she offered to examine an old-timer‘s hernia, he growled, ―Don‘t you go touching me . . . . I 
won‘t have you messing with my innards!‖ (O‘Connor 1993: 1) In another episode, a prisoner 
regained consciousness after he was successfully treated by Michaela, and shouted ―You let a 
dang woman work on me?  What are you trying to kill me?‖ (Suarez 2008: 1).  
Regularly, Michaela also found the people of Colorado Springs to be unreceptive to her 
progressive views, particularly when it came to race. One of the more common topics on Dr. 
Quinn was the treatment of Colorado‘s Native Americans, with a character called Cloud Dancing 
serving as a sort of microcosm of his people, constantly enduring broken treaties and army 
massacres. The show‘s handling of these topics was sincere but occasionally a bit ham-fisted, as 
noted by New York Times critic John J. O‘Connor:     
One recent episode probably set a record in its opening minutes for 
multi-cultural sensitivity. Mike informed one of her young ‗uns: 
―We‘re all immigrants. Some of us just came to America sooner 
than others.‖ Then the camera panned to the village smithy, who 
happened to be black. ―Robert E. did not come here willingly,‖ 
Mike added. Then, spotting some American Indians, she conceded: 
―I was wrong. We are not all immigrants‖ (O‘Connor 1993: 1).   
 
 O‘Connor, as did most critics, found the show to be a mixture of sickeningly sweet 
homilies, trite melodrama, and overbearing political correctness. In fact, he argued that Dr. 
Quinn had the feel of a ―shampoo commercial in the making:‖   
One recipe for a successful series: take a contrived concept, 
sprinkle with homespun truisms updated for political correctness 
and mix well with tired plot devices. Process and serve. And out 
comes Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman . . . . Possible subtitle: Little 
561 
 
Shtick on the Prairie . . . . Dr. Quinn is a television construct, its 
every nuance calculated out of lowest-common-denominator 
concerns. Art, or even craft, decidedly takes a back seat to 
commerce . . . . Subtlety is not a strong suit. You want local color? 
Get the store owner to announce to the kids, ―We‘re still out of 
jawbreakers.‖ Or, at a picnic, have someone sit on a gorgeous 
patchwork quilt and shout gleefully, ―Hey, let‘s pitch some 
horseshoes!‖ Then it‘s quickly back to the uninspired business at 
hand (O‘Connor 1993: 1).  
 
To the chagrin of the critics, however, Dr. Quinn drew a strong audience, doing particularly well 
among young women, and single-handedly brought the warm, family-friendly drama back from 
the dead. The program ranked in the Nielsen top twenty-five during its first two seasons, and 
remained on the air for more than five years.  
Colorado‘s final period piece, Legend, debuted in 1995 and featured yet another new-
comer to the state. This time it was Ernest Platt, a drunken writer who moved to Sheridan, 
Colorado, in 1876 to assume the identity of Nicodemus Legend, a character he had popularized 
in a series of dime novels. Platt was played by Richard Dean Anderson, previously seen on 
MacGyver, and Legend featured a similar obsession with creative gadgetry. It could not, however 
muster the audience of the previous series, and departed after four months.  
Colorado‘s first contemporary drama, 1961‘s Bus Stop, took the extreme approach of 
having a newcomer or, rather, a whole busload of newcomers, arrive each week. Based on the 
successful William Inge play and subsequent film, the title bus stop was a diner in the fictional 
Rocky Mountain town of Sunrise. Stories revolved around interactions of bus passengers with 
the show‘s four regular characters—the diner‘s owner, its only waitress, the town sheriff, and the 
district attorney. The series is probably best remembered for an episode starring teen idol Fabian 
Forte called ―A Lion Walks Among Us.‖ Fabian played a young drifter who had been accused of 
562 
 
murder. To win an acquittal, he had an affair with the prosecuting attorney‘s alcoholic wife and, 
once free, killed his own lawyers before finally dying at the hands of his former lover.  This 
episode‘s ―sadism-and-smut‖ message sparked widespread outrage, with critic Jack Gould of The 
New York Times calling it ―a disgraceful and contemptible flaunting of decency, an indescribably 
coarse glorification of vulgarity to win an easy rating‖ (Mehling 1962: 166). The episode was so 
controversial, in fact, that it prompted Congressional hearings, and likely forced the the 
program‘s cancellation in the spring of 1962.  
If anything, Bus Stop reinforced the notion that life in Colorado could be dangerous 
business, and perhaps it was that danger that drew so many doctors to the state. Like Michaela 
Quinn, the protagonist of Doc Elliot was an easterner who wanted to start a new life. Dr. 
Benjamin Elliot left a lucrative career in New York City to be a general practitioner in rugged 
Gideon, Colorado. He served patients who were scattered over an enormous swath of wilderness, 
which Elliot traversed by airplane or in his specially outfitted four-wheel-drive camper. 
Essentially an excuse to showcase Colorado‘s spectacular mountain scenery, Doc Elliot lasted 
for seven months in 1974. The state‘s third contemporary drama, The Innocent and the Damned, 
was a 1979 mini-series about a young lawyer‘s attempt to free a man who had been wrongfully 
convicted of the rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old girl. A secondary plot involved attempts 
by greedy, manipulative developers to transform quiet little Aspen, Colorado, into a major resort 
town.    
Only one Colorado-based program made its debut in the 1980s, but it proved to be not 
only the state‘s most successful entry, but also one of the most popular dramas in the history of 
television. Dynasty, which premiered in 1981, revived many familiar themes of Colorado 
dramas. Like the contemporary Bus Stop and The Innocent and the Damned, Dynasty was full of 
563 
 
psychological tumult, betrayal, greed, and even a few murders. Like Colorado‘s Old West 
programs, there was plenty of villainous treachery to go around, and like most of Colorado‘s 
entries there was breathtaking mountain scenery. The first shot in the opening credits was a 
spectacular aerial view of snowcapped mountain peaks, although the subsequent visuals 
indicated that viewers would see an entirely different version of Colorado. Sleepy mountain 
villages and frontier towns were replaced by images of limousines, smoked-glass skyscrapers, 
and an opulent mansion. The cast was seen sipping brandy and champagne, looking 
aristocratically grim in tuxedoes and evening gowns. From the outset, Dynasty was clearly not 
the story of life in Wretched.    
Dynasty was ABC‘s answer to the CBS megahit soap opera Dallas, and although the 
setting was now Denver, the fabulous wealth came similarly from the oil industry. Blake 
Carrington was the head of Denver-Carrington Oil, which was fighting for its life after a 
revolution in the Middle East led to the nationalization of many of the company‘s assets. The 
real problem was not petroleum politics, of course, but Blake‘s troubled family and their 
acquaintances. These people included Krystle, his glamorous yet melancholic wife; Fallon, his 
spoiled daughter; and Steven, his troubled son. At the deep, black heart of Dynasty was Blake‘s 
exwife, Alexis, described by one critic as ―one of the campiest and most beloved bitch goddesses 
ever to strut, stagger, skulk, slug, and scheme her way into the family rooms of America‖ (West 
2005: 33). 
Dynasty was a mind-bogglingly complex array of characters, plots, and subplots. In their 
summary of the series, Brooks and Marsh listed sixty-three recurring characters, noting that 
every last one of them ―was either filthy rich and disgusting or not-so-rich and disgusting‖ 
(Brooks and Marsh 2007: 400). And, if Dynasty is to be believed, being rich and disgusting is not 
564 
 
as easy as it looks. Some of the high (or low) points of the series included Blake‘s trial for the 
murder of Steven‘s gay lover; Alexis causing Krystle to lose her baby; Krystle and Alexis 
engaging in a knock-down, drag-out fight in a lily pond; Steven‘s injury in an explosion in 
Indonesia; a deadly fire at Blake‘s resort hotel; Krystle and Alexis trapped together in a burning 
cabin; Blake and Alexis running against one another for the state‘s governorship; and, perhaps 
most spectacular, the season-ending near-murder of the entire cast by machine gun-wielding 
revolutionaries at a royal wedding in Moldavia. In the series finale, Dynasty exited in appropriate 
fashion, with Fallon and her sister ―trapped together in a collapsing mine shaft with a buried 
Nazi art collection and a deranged killer‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 401).            
Like Dallas, Dynasty gained momentum quickly. It finished its first season nineteenth in 
the Nielsen ratings, and climbed into the top seven for the next four years, peaking in the top spot 
during the 1984-1985 season. Dynasty dropped back to seventh in 1986 and to twenty-fourth in 
1987, before finally being cancelled in the spring of 1989. In hindsight, the fact that Dynasty 
never made it to the 1990s seems wholly appropriate. Its demise marked the end of a decade-
long obsession with lavish prime-time soaps, and although it never quite equaled Dallas‘s 
ratings, it was named by TV Guide as the best soap opera of the decade. The magazine wrote that 
its ―campy opulence gave it a superb, ironic quality—in other words, it was great trash‖ 
(Mazzarella 2010: 1). For some, including critic Todd Ramlow, it was the quintessential 1980s 
program, despite its decidedly artificial approach:  
Even if Dynasty never represented any ―truth‖ about the U. S. back 
then, it did represent a sort of dominant national fantasy of 
American life and burgeoning neocon ideals. To sum it up: excess, 
excess, excess. Big shoulder pads, big hair, big jewels, big houses, 
big oil companies, and the lives of the mostly idle rich: it‘s all 
there in Dynasty, in big spades (Ramlow 2010: 1). 
565 
 
 
Dynasty almost certainly altered the viewing public‘s perception of Colorado. While the 
state‘s television landscape had entered the 1980s as a collection of rustic little towns, it had 
exited it squarely in the lap of luxury. And, for better or worse, the show put Denver on the 
television map, and there is no indication that Denverites were upset with the avaricious nature 
of the show. If anything, they appeared upset that some of the Dynasty‘s opulence was not their 
own. The home that served as the exterior for Blake‘s mansion, for example, was actually 
located in Woodside, California. Coloradans were even more upset that the spectacular snow-
covered mountains from the show‘s credits were also stand-ins from California. In response to 
volumes of hate mail, Dynasty‘s producers belatedly began inserting more establishing shots 
from the city itself, and even filmed a few episodes on location. The most notable was a 1985 
episode filmed at Denver‘s extravagant Carousel Ball, which featured appearances by President 
and Mrs. Gerald Ford and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.  
Only two more contemporary Colorado-based dramas would follow Dynasty, and both of 
them possessed a very different perspective on the state. The first was Promised Land, which had 
roamed the country for two years before settling down in Colorado. A heartwarming, family-
oriented series, this was the story of Russell Green, an unemployed factory worker who decided 
to ―redefine what it meant to be a good neighbor and recapture the American dream‖ (Brooks 
and Marsh 2007: 1,114). Russell, along with his mother, wife, two sons, and nephew roamed the 
country in a worn-out travel trailer, picking up work where they could, and doing good deeds in 
the process. They eventually settled in Denver which, by 1998, had lost some of the luster of the 
Carrington years. The Greens moved into a run-down house in a struggling neighborhood where 
they befriended a former gang member and a young single mother and where Russell 
566 
 
volunteered at a local teen center. Such good works did not appeal to viewers as much as the 
Carrington‘s bad ones, and Promised Land was cancelled at the conclusion of its first season in 
Denver.    
Colorado‘s final dramatic entry to date, 2002‘s Everwood, was, in some ways, a 
microcosm of the many dramas that had preceded it. A newcomer (yet another doctor) following 
another death of a loved one, started a new life in yet another fictional small town amid 
spectacular mountain scenery. He, too, encountered danger, psychological tumult, family issues, 
and some resistance from the wary locals. This time the doctor was Andy Brown, a successful 
New York neurosurgeon who, following the death of his wife in an auto accident, moved with 
his son and daughter to Everwood, Colorado, which was every bit as rustic and beautiful as its 
named suggests. Andy had more than enough money, so he opened a free clinic in Everwood, 
where his medical cases were a little more au currant than those of his Colorado predecessors, 
including drug addiction, AIDS, spinal cancer, and a young man in a coma. The kids were not 
enthusiastic about the move, of course, with his son Ephram referring to it as ―Harrison-Ford-in-
Mosquito Coast crazy‖ (Razlogova 2002: 1).   
  Everwood never accumulated tremendous ratings, but they were good enough for the 
struggling WB network, and the show remained on air for four seasons. Elena Razlogova, like 
many other television critics, was not impressed by Everwood, calling it ―a perfect example of 
Hollywood's assembly-line production and marketing.‖ She took exception to both the show‘s 
lack of originality and geographic accuracy:      
Apart from gorgeous panoramas of the snowy Rockies, Everwood 
offers little fresh material . . . . Executive producers Greg Berlanti 
and Mickey Liddell seem to have culled the show‘s main dramatic 
conventions from other successful dramas about small-town family 
567 
 
and community life . . . . Still, the creators of Everwood miss any 
compelling aspects of the storylines they ransack. In interviews, 
Berlanti has compared Everwood's focus—Brown‘s relationship 
with Ephram—to that of Gilmore Girls, about a mother-daughter 
relationship in yet another quirky small town. But a single woman 
who chose to have a daughter at sixteen and raise her on her own 
while holding a full-time job has little, or rather nothing, in 
common with a world-famous neurosurgeon who moves to a small 
town on a whim, having raised his children by proxy, with enough 
money saved to play doctor for free. Girls, in other words, explores 
a set of class and gender issues that Everwood avoids. In crafting 
this fantasy, the show does a disservice to diverse populations 
living in small Northwestern towns. And that includes the white 
middle-class people at the center of Everwood, as well as those it 
leaves out, for example, the seasonal immigrant and tourism 
industry workers who populate most small Colorado towns 
(Razlogova 2002: 1).   
 
Although Colorado‘s television landscape has favored dramas over sitcoms, two of its 
most successful programs have been comedies. The first was the 1978 slapstick comedy Mork & 
Mindy, which was Colorado‘s first hit show. Half of the title pair was Mindy McConnell, a 
journalism student (and eventual television reporter) who clerked part-time, along with her sassy 
grandmother, at her father‘s music store. The setting was Boulder, and the opening credits 
included the usual dose of attractive mountain scenery as Mindy cruised into town in her Jeep. 
Her counterpart, Mork, was the ultimate newcomer to Colorado. Played by frenetic stand-up 
comic Robin Williams, Mork was an alien from the planet Ork. The sullen Orkans, who could 
never quite get a handle on the zany Mork, had an even tougher time understanding the strange 
habits of earthlings, and so sent Mork off to Boulder to study them. Once there, Mork 
immediately befriended Mindy, and moved into the attic of her apartment in a quaint Victorian 
home. Only Mindy knew Mork‘s secret, and much of the comedy derived from Mork‘s 
inevitable misunderstandings of human ways. The general public, of course, thought he was ―just 
some kind of a nut‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 919).   
568 
 
Although Mork & Mindy was essentially a vehicle for the manic comedy of Williams, it 
also showcased the kinds of moralistic lessons that would later be a staple of Dr. Quinn, 
Medicine Woman. Each episode concluded with Mork‘s report to his unseen Orkan superior, 
Orson, and each was a little homily about life on earth. Some of the issues on Mork & Mindy 
were timeless, such as life, death, love, and hate, but others were contemporary, ranging from 
immigration to sexism. One episode dealt with a greedy landlord, and another with black-market 
babies. In yet another, Mork encountered a hate group similar to the Ku Klux Klan, forcing 
Mindy to explain racial discrimination to him and, of course, the viewer. ―We‘re all created 
equal,‖ she told him, adding that ―It‘s easier to put down someone who is different than 
understand him.‖ In his report to Orson, Mork waxed poetic. ―When you mix all earthlings 
together, you get this incredible rainbow,‖ he said. ―Everyone has a pot of gold‖ (Lichter, 
Lichter, and Rothman 1991: 259). 
One could suggest that Mork & Mindy‘s emphasis on moral lessons made it something of 
a modern western, but such morality tales aren‘t exclusive to programs set in the West, and Mork 
& Mindy‘s Boulder setting appears somewhat arbitrary. According to Fran Golden, the show‘s 
producers selected the state simply because numerous UFO sightings had been reported in the 
Colorado Rockies. Boulder, in particular, was chosen because ―it seemed likely an alien would 
end up in the college town‖ (Golden 1996: 167). 
In any case, Mork & Mindy was initially a smash hit, placing fourth in the Nielsen ratings 
in its first season. Just as quickly as success arrived, however, it vanished. Producers meddled 
with the format of the series, dropping a number of regular characters and adding some episodes 
with surrealist themes, including the second-season opener where Mork was ―dropped into a 
never-never world filled with caricatures of good and evil‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 919). At 
569 
 
the same time, ABC moved the show from Thursday to Sunday nights, and its audience 
vanished. The network moved the show back to its original spot in January of its second season, 
but the damage was done. Ratings dropped every year the show was on the air, and it was 
ultimately cancelled after season four.   
It would be fifteen years before another comedy would arrive on the Colorado television 
landscape. Then five made their debuts between 1997 and 2003. The Denver-based sitcoms The 
Closer and House Rules premiered in 1998, each lasting two months. The Closer was the story of 
a smarmy ad executive, while House Rules was a buddy comedy about three young women—a 
lawyer, a reporter, and a nurse—who shared a Victorian home. The Denver-based comedy Rock 
Me Baby, which aired during the 2003-2004 season, concerned the cohosts of a wild Denver 
radio show, one of whom had just become a father. Sixty-six episodes of a syndicated television 
series based on the 1989 film Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, were produced from 1997 to 2000. Set in 
Matheson, Colorado, the show followed the exploits of eccentric inventor Wayne Szalinski, 
whose strange gadgets put the family into fanciful scrapes. None of these programs were terribly 
successful, but they were notable for their trend toward urban settings, and toward characters 
whose lifestyles more closely resembled those seen on programs set throughout the country.  
 Still, the most successful of the Colorado-based comedies of this time period ran counter 
to the trends, taking place in a small town and containing characters unlike anything seen before 
on television. South Park, a crude-looking cartoon about a group of foul-mouthed children, first 
appeared in 1997 on the then-lowly cable channel, Comedy Central. Against all conventional 
wisdom, the show quickly became the most talked-about new series of the year, and eventually 
transformed Comedy Central into a serious cable outlet on its way to becoming Colorado‘s 
longest-running program at fourteen years and counting.  
570 
 
 South Park‘s protagonists were Stan Marsh and Kyle Broflovski, a pair of relatively 
normal fourth graders living in the small mountain town of South Park along with classmates 
Kenny McCormick and Eric Cartman. Kenny was the poor kid, whose oversized orange parka 
reduced his voice to an unintelligible mumble that only his friends could understand. Eric was a 
fat, spoiled, and self-centered loudmouth who constantly antagonized (and who was constantly 
antagonized by) his friends. A running gag on the show was the grisly death of Kenny, an event 
that happened on nearly every episode, always followed by the lines ―Oh my God! They killed 
Kenny! You bastards!‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 1,277). The repeated bludgeoning death of a 
fourth-grader was, however, one of the least bizarre things to happen in South Park.       
 Although a basin called South Park exists in central Colorado, the town itself is fictional. 
At first glance, it is a relatively typical American small town, featuring a city hall, a library, a 
courthouse, a town square, the Bijou Theater, a few churches, and a utilitarian elementary 
school. Houses range from ornate mansions to little bungalows, and the Main Street is lined with 
small businesses, including Jimbo‘s Guns and Tom‘s Rhinoplasty. Fitting into the motif of rural 
Colorado as a wild and dangerous place, the town is always threatened by one potential disaster 
or another, including hurricanes, zombies, mutant turkeys and space aliens. In the words of one 
character, ―This is just a small, quiet, mountain community where nothing out of the ordinary 
ever really happens, except for the occasional complete destruction of the entire town‖ (Johnson-
Woods 2007: 161).  
Along with a liberal dose of bizarre plots and gross-out gags, South Park also contained 
storylines similar to any other sitcom, detailing the kids‘ relationships with one another, their 
parents and teachers, and chronicling the inevitable joys and pains of growing up. It was also 
fierce satire. The show tackled consumer culture, religious hypocrisy, sexuality, and political 
571 
 
agendas of every stripe. In its own off-kilter way, South Park dealt with Hurricane Katrina, the 
Iraq war, the Elian Gonzales incident, and the hyperbole surrounding global warming. It 
lambasted television conventions, having the audacity, for example, to name the only African-
American kid at Stan and Kyle‘s school ―Token Black.‖ Favorite targets included Christian 
fundamentalists, fear-mongering and hype-driven journalists, hippies, incompetent government 
bureaucrats, and televangelists. The foils of choice, however, were, more often than not, 
celebrities, as in one episode where all the girls in South Park rushed out to purchase Paris 
Hilton‘s Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset.  
South Park resembled two animated contemporaries, The Simpsons and Family Guy, in 
having its setting serve as a neutral backdrop before which contemporary American politics, 
society, and popular culture could be skewered. But it also possessed some themes specific to 
small towns and small Colorado towns in particular. Showing small-town residents as eccentric, 
provincial, and narrow-minded is not unusual on television, but what sets South Park apart from 
most other of television‘s small towns is that its residents seemed to revel in their prejudice and 
ignorance.They never learned lessons, and were ready, willing, and able to be driven to ecstasy 
by the latest cultural fad. Critic Toni Johnson-Woods argued that the show‘s flat, one-
dimensional animation style ―gestures to the one-dimensionality of town life and the narrowness 
of small-town mentality‖ (Johnson-Woods 2007: 156). While that might be a bit of a stretch, 
there is no doubting her assessment that South Park was depicted as a ―redneck twenty-first-
century town‖ (Johnson-Woods 2007: 152). The upper class of the town smacked of nouveau-
riche vulgarity and the middle class of thoughtless conformity. The town‘s lower class, in the 
form of Kenny and his family, did not shatter any stereotypes, either:   
572 
 
The McCormick house is metonymic for ―white trash.‖ Signifiers 
of ―white trash‖ are the front yard detritus of car repairs: an empty 
oilcan, discarded tires, and a car with front wheels on blocks; 
furthermore, the yard contains a broken refrigerator and a sofa and 
the garage door is skewed and seemingly broken. The inside 
completes the ―white trash‖ picture: the living room boasts a neon 
beer sign, cinder blocks prop up a makeshift coffee table, a car seat 
stands in for the couch. The kitchen cupboard doors hang off their 
hinges, and Kenny‘s room has a hole in the ceiling, a frameless 
mattress, and ripped curtains . . . . Empty liquor bottles, oilcans, 
and a car engine litter the living room. The coffee table shows un-
mopped spills. Kenny‘s clothes are scattered on the floor of his 
bedroom. Rats roam freely (Johnson-Woods 2007: 159). 
 
 Still, a few moments on South Park reveal an almost affectionate view of small-town life. 
The episode ―Die Hippie, Die,‖ suggests, in fact, that such life might be something of an ideal. In 
that episode, hippies invaded the town and proceeded to smoke pot, sit in drum circles, listen to 
the music, and complain about corporate America. Otherwise, they didn‘t do much. While 
Cartman went on an antihippie crusade to save the town, Kyle and Stan joined the newcomers, 
and were preparing for the coming revolution:  
STAN: So it seems like we have enough people now. When do we 
start taking down the corporations? 
 
HIPPIE: Yeah man, the corporations. Right now they‘re raping the 
world for money! 
 
KYLE: Yeah, so, where are they? Let's go get ‗em. 
 
HIPPIE: Right now we‘re proving we don‘t need corporations. We 
don‘t need money. This can become a commune where everyone 
just helps each other. 
 
OTHER HIPPIE: Yeah, we‘ll have one guy who like, makes bread. 
And one guy who like, looks out for other people‘s safety. 
 
STAN: You mean like a baker and a cop? 
 
HIPPIE: No, no. Can't you imagine a place where people live 
573 
 
together and like, provide services for each other in exchange for 
their services? 
 
KYLE: Yeah, it‘s called a town (South Park Studios 2005: 1).  
 
Generally, when a population is as disagreeable as the residents of South Park, any 
outsider is a beneficial force, as was the case in Colorado‘s Sara and Dr. Quinn, Medicine 
Woman. In South Park, however, outsiders were often as dense as the locals and far more 
destructive. Often they were celebrities whose egomaniacal and sanctimonious attitudes created a 
serious annoyance for the townspeople or, in more extreme cases, mass destruction. In one 
episode, the townspeople battled a gigantic killer robot called Mecha-Streisand. On another, 
Robert Redford and a legion of Hollywood movie moguls took over the town and almost 
destroyed its ecosystem because they were, figuratively and literally, full of shit.  
Series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker are both Colorado natives, and this appears to 
be the geographic message closest to their hearts—that the residents of small towns can be weak 
and ignorant, but, then, so can everyone else. That said, it is difficult to peg South Park to any 
particular political or social philosophy. The show has offended just about everyone at one time 
or another. If there is a unifying theme, it the one reiterated in a thousand television westerns—
that civilized behavior is a tenuous thing at best. This sentiment was reflected in a statement by 
Matt Stone:   
There‘s two competing theories in the world. One is that we‘re 
born natural and beautiful and good, and that society corrupts us, 
which is what I think a lot of people believe. South Park is based 
on completely the opposite notion, that we are born basically 
gorillas, and that society keeps us just barely in line (O‘Neill 2005: 
1).  
 
574 
 
MONTANA 
Depictions of the American West, like all American regions, have provided mixed, often 
contradictory, messages about the region‘s basic character. As noted before, the most common 
theme of television Westerns is that of a lone, rugged individual standing up against a tide of 
violence and greed, attempting to civilize a region that is wild, lawless, and uncivilized. 
Secondary, but still important regional behaviors suggested by television westerns are those of 
youthful vigor, optimism, and personal renewal. All of these have been key in Montana‘s 
relatively modest television landscape.  
Montana‘s earliest television entries were of the youthful vigor variety, including the 
state‘s first entry, My Friend Flicka, which ran from 1956 to 1958. An update of the 1943 film, it 
told of the trials and tribulations of a family trying to scratch out a living on a turn-of-the century 
ranch, but the focus was a young boy and his beloved horse, Flicka. Two months after Flicka‟s 
demise, Buckskin premiered, running until the fall of 1959. Set in the frontier town of Buckskin, 
Montana, in the 1880s, the show focused on the interactions of a ten-year-old boy who lived in 
his mother‘s boarding house with townspeople and passers-through. Lonesome Dove, a 
syndicated series that was produced from 1994 to 1996, was based on the Larry McMurtry novel, 
and was a continuation of two popular miniseries the novel had spawned. Filmed in Alberta and 
set in Curtis Wells, Montana, in the 1870s, the program focused on a youthful stable hand, Newt 
Call, and his love interest, Hannah. Newt‘s chief rival for Hannah‘s affections was Colonel 
Mosby, a former Confederate officer who was a gunfighter, bank robber, and saloon owner.  
Youthful vigor, however, apparently did not have much drawing power in 1990s, and in 
its second year Lonesome Dove tacked toward the more classic Western theme of a gritty lead 
575 
 
character standing up against the forces of evil. As the second season began, Mosby had taken 
control of Curtis Wells, which looked, as noted by Brooks and Marsh, ―much grimier‖ than it 
had in the first season (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 1808). The show‘s tone and title also became 
markedly darker, adopting the name Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years. Hannah was killed in 
an explosion, the sheriff had been murdered, the town‘s hotel had been sold to a grifter, and 
Newt, now a bounty hunter, had developed a relationship with Mattie, a rough-and-tumble 
gunsmith and undertaker.  
Just two of Montana‘s programs have had contemporary settings. The first, 1993‘s Angel 
Falls, was a primetime soap opera, an unusual genre for a small-town western setting, but the 
show did rehash the common western theme of personal renewal. Rae Dawn Snow had recently 
moved back home to the title town with her sixteen-year-old son to run the family pool hall. 
Episodes centered on the son‘s new romantic entanglements, and the mother‘s renewed ones. 
Angel Falls offered the usual soap opera schemes, promiscuity, and heartache, but viewers were 
not sure what to make of it, and the show was pulled after six weeks. Montana‘s final entry, 
Caitlin‟s Way, which ran from 2000 to 2002, was also an odd mixture of twenty-first-century 
dysfunction and the traditional Western theme of youthful renewal. Caitlin, a troubled fourteen-
year-old orphan from the mean streets of inner-city Philadelphia, was given the choice between 
juvenile hall and going to live with her relatives, a veterinarian and a local sheriff, in rural 
Montana. She chose the latter, and although she had some early troubles, the relatives were 
patient with her rebellious ways. As it so often does on television, the West began to heal 
Caitlin‘s emotional wounds. She made a friend at school and developed an interest in 
photography. Television life in Montana then came full circle when, in Flickaesque fashion, 
Caitlin adopted a wild stallion named Bandit, who had saved her from a rabid wolf.   
576 
 
WASHINGTON 
Like other western states, Washington‘s first television entry was set in a nineteenth-
century boomtown, but 1968‘s Here Come the Brides was hardly a conventional western. It was 
the story of Jason Bolt and his brothers, who ran a logging camp on Bridal Veil Mountain near 
Seattle.  This camp was nearing a state of mutiny, however, the problem being that nearly all of 
Seattle‘s 152 residents were men, and the love-starved lumberjacks were getting desperate. So, 
Jason sailed off to Massachusetts and convinced a hundred potential brides to return west with 
him. There was, of course, a catch. In order to finance his enterprise, Jason had borrowed money 
with the understanding that if any of the prospective brides left before the end of a year, the Bolt 
family would forfeit their land. In the end, he convinced them all to stick around, and Here Come 
the Brides managed to remain on the air for two seasons. A few of the show‘s basic traits would 
reappear on subsequent Washington-based programs. Many have featured recently arrived (or 
recently returned) characters, and a few would borrow Brides‘s central theme of a rough and 
tumble Seattle coming into contact with a civilizing force. Some also gave a nod to the timber 
industry, but Here Come the Brides would be Washington‘s last period piece, and its last show 
for more than a decade. 
Washington returned with a pair of situation comedies in the mid-1980s. The state 
eventually served as the setting for eight sitcoms, but only five of them appeared on a major 
network, and just one of those lasted at least a full season. CBS was responsible for three of the 
network duds, the first being Domestic Life, which aired for six months in 1984. It was the story 
of Martin Crane, who, like so many of Seattle‘s television residents, had recently moved to the 
city. He had taken a job at a local television station, where he delivered human interest stories. 
The action was divided between Martin‘s lives at the station and at home with his wife and two 
577 
 
children. The Cranes would be one of the few traditional nuclear families to appear on 
Washington‘s television landscape, but the public never got excited and Domestic Life lasted just 
six months.  
The Boys, another sitcom, was the story of Doug Kirkfield, a New York author recently 
arrived in a small town outside of Seattle to work on his second novel. The show centered on the 
relationship between sophisticated Doug and a trio of grouchy blue-collar pals who met for a 
weekly poker game next door—Burt, a retired fireman; Harlan, who owned an antique shop; and 
Al, who had ―worked his entire career in a tar factory and was euphoric when talking about tar‖ 
(Brooks and Marsh 2007: 175). After The Boys lasted just five weeks in 1993, CBS made just 
one more attempt at a Seattle sitcom. The area‘s famously successful software industry has not 
often served as comic fodder, and perhaps 1995‘s Dweebs explains why. It was the story of a 
young but legendary software designer named Warren Moseby. Like all of the programmers at 
his Seattle company, Cyberbyte, Warren was brilliant, but also incredibly shy and socially 
awkward. Into the mix came sexy new office administrator Carey, who taught Warren and the 
other dweebs the ways of the world, at least for six weeks.  
Seattle‘s sitcom landscape has included a pair of syndicated programs, the first of which 
was One Big Family. Danny Thomas, who had been a New York nightclub comedian in a 
previous sitcom life, played a semiretired nightclub comedian who moved to Seattle to take care 
of five orphaned grandchildren after his son and daughter-in-law were killed in a car accident. 
This multigeneration comedy never caught on, and the program ceased production after five 
months. Seattle‘s second syndicated sitcom, Harry and the Hendersons, based on a 1987 movie 
of the same name, featured another blended family. This time, the newcomer was not Grandpa 
but a seven foot tall Sasquatch, also known as Bigfoot or, in this case, Harry. The Hendersons 
578 
 
had accidentally hit Harry with their car, and they brought him to their Seattle home to nurse him 
back to health. The show followed the personal and professional lives of the Hendersons, 
including a story arc in which the dad, George, quit his job at a sporting goods company to start a 
magazine called The Better Life, which dealt with ecological issues. Most of the stories, 
however, revolved around the family‘s efforts to keep their big house guest a secret. The show 
was released in 1991, and seventy-two episodes of the program were produced between 1991 
and 1993.  
Seattle‘s last off-network comedy, and its last sitcom to date, was Romeo!, which aired 
on the youth-oriented Nickelodeon cable outlet. It was the story of the Millers, a black Seattle 
family headed by Percy, a widowed record producer, who was played by rap mogul Master P. 
His son (both on the show and in real life) was Romeo, an aspiring rapper and basketball star 
who headed the family band, Pieces of the Puzzle. Also seen were Romeo‘s sister Jodi, his 
brother Gary, and, in a significant step forward in race relations on family sitcoms, his adopted 
white brother, Louis. It was a bright, happy sitcom, typical for its cable home, and ran for fifty-
three episodes from 2003 to 2006.     
Down on the major network end of the dial, NBC launched two Seattle-based sitcoms in 
1993. The first was a salvage effort called Almost Home, which appeared in February. After an 
unsuccessful season in Oklahoma, the title family of The Torkelsons followed the lead of a 
number of their television cohort and moved to Seattle, with the show taking on a new name. It 
featured working-class mom Millicent Torkelson, who had just taken a job as live-in nanny for 
Brian Morgan, the owner of a successful mail-order business. Millicent‘s rambunctious brood 
was not greeted warmly by Brian‘s snooty kids, but it didn‘t matter much, as the second life for 
The Torkelsons lasted just five months.     
579 
 
The title character of NBC‘s other 1993 entry was, like Millicent Torkelson, a holdover 
from a previous sitcom, and was also looking to start a new life in Seattle. The difference, of 
course, was that Frasier Crane came with a much more reputable sitcom pedigree. Kelsey 
Grammer had played the pompous psychologist on the wildly successful Cheers for nine of the 
show‘s eleven years. A number of television‘s more successful sitcoms have been spin-offs, 
including The Facts of Life, Family Matters, Gomer Pyle, U. S. M. C., Good Times, and The 
Jeffersons. For each one of these successes, however, there have been a number of disasters, 
such as Joanie Loves Chachi, AfterMASH, the Ropers, Fish, Flo, Gloria, and Grady. To the 
relief of NBC, Frasier not only survived, but went on to equal Cheers in longevity and 
popularity.  
As the show began, Frasier had left Boston and his icy wife, Lillith, behind, moving back 
to his hometown of Seattle. He was now dispensing advice on the radio, where his coworkers 
included Bob ―Bulldog‖ Briscoe, the loud-mouth host of KACL‘s sports program, and Gil 
Chesterston, the station‘s pompous food critic. He developed a close, if somewhat contentious, 
friendship with his producer, the salty Roz Doyle. Frasier also reconnected with his brother 
Niles, a fellow psychiatrist who was somehow even more pretentious than Frasier. Niles lived in 
a ludicrously opulent mansion with his tyrannical wife, Maris, who was so far removed from the 
unwashed masses of humanity that she was never actually seen on the show. When not sipping 
coffee with Niles or Roz at the modish Café Nervosa, Frasier could usually be found in his 
stylish luxury apartment, which featured a spectacular view of the Seattle skyline. Just when the 
star-crossed Frasier seemed to have his life in order, along came his estranged father, Martin 
Crane. A former Seattle police detective, Martin had been shot in the line of duty, resulting in a 
debilitating hip injury that forced him to walk with a cane, and which made it difficult for him to 
580 
 
live alone. A reluctant Frasier invited Martin in, realizing too late that along with Martin came a 
bubbly English home-care therapist named Daphne, a mischievous terrier named Eddie, and 
Seattle‘s ugliest easy chair. 
Like Cheers, Fraiser‘s hallmark was sharp, witty, rapid-fire dialogue reminiscent of 
1930s screwball comedies. A classic example of this was found in a 1998 episode, ―Merry 
Christmas Mrs. Moskowitz,‖ in which the Crane family pretended to be Jewish on Christmas 
Eve in order to fool Frasier‘s girlfriend‘s mother. When Martin worried that he wouldn‘t be able 
to pull it off, he was coached by Niles:   
MARTIN: I don‘t know how to be Jewish. 
NILES: Well, just answer questions with a question.  
MARTIN: Like what? 
NILES: What, I have to explain everything?  
MARTIN: Can‘t you give me an example?  
NILES: What, I should give you an example?  
MARTIN: Are you going to help me or not?  
NILES: You‘re saying I‘m not being helpful?  
MARTIN: Oh, forget it! (Abernethy 2003: 1) 
 
Frasier also adhered to a time-honored comic philosophy that closely resembled that of 
Jack Benny, in which the protagonist is the exasperated straight man. Frasier Crane, like Benny‘s 
on-air alter ego, was vain and self-centered, but somehow likable, probably because he was 
forever being hoisted on his own pompous petard. A common gag on Frasier was the call-in 
segment of the radio show, which would begin with Frasier‘s placid, self-assured, catch phrase, 
581 
 
―I‘m listening.‖ The caller (often voiced by an uncredited celebrity, such as Mel Brooks, Art 
Garfunkel, or Timothy Leary), then would present Frasier with a problem that was often so 
trivial, unsolvable, or downright bizarre that it ultimately would lead to the host‘s undoing. This 
comic formula—the deflating of the pompous—permeated the show, as in one episode where 
Frasier, hesitant to admit a mistake, told Daphne, ―You don‘t understand. It‘s not the same as 
Dad being wrong, or you being wrong. I have a degree from Harvard. Whenever I‘m wrong, the 
world makes a little less sense‖ (West 2005: 44).  
Just as Cheers had done for Boston, Frasier depicted Seattle as being the collision of two 
cultures, with the sophisticated and often pedantic world of Frasier, Niles, Maris, and Gil 
conflicting with the earthy and sometimes crude world of Martin, Daphne, Roz, and Bulldog. 
Critic Stephen Tropiano described Frasier as ―essentially the story of one man who appreciates 
the finer things in life, yet feels trapped in what he regards as an inferior, uncultured, and 
unsophisticated world‖ (Tropiano 2003b: 1). Frasier and Niles reveled in their sophistication, and 
the show was often lauded as one of the most erudite on television, with frequent references to 
classical music, fine wines, literature, and philosophy. An appreciation for life‘s finer things was 
never belittled, but the cachet and self-importance often associated with such things nearly 
always was. Whenever Frasier or Niles sought out something strictly for its exclusivity—tickets 
to a sold-out show, an invitation to a posh dinner party, membership in an elite club—that is 
when they met their undoing. A good many of Frasier‘s episodes involved Frasier desperately 
seeking something for all the wrong reasons, not getting it, throwing a tantrum, and learning a 
lesson.   
Martin, the man‘s-man counterpoint to the effete snobbery of Niles and Frasier, was 
usually the one who dispensed the lessons. The show often took jabs at Martin‘s blue collar 
582 
 
sensibilities, as in one episode where Frasier commented that ―by tonight my dad will be safely 
back in his beer-stained, flea-infested, duct-taped recliner, adjusting his shorts with one hand and 
cheering on Jean-Claude Van Damme with the other‖ (West 2005: 44). Stephen Tropiano wrote 
that the episodes pitting Frasier and Martin against one another were ―by far the most 
entertaining and touching:‖  
Frasier and Martin butt heads over everything from privacy to 
restaurants to dad‘s recliner. In ―Give Him the Chair,‖ Frasier 
(with a little help from Niles) convinces himself that it would be in 
his father‘s best interest to go behind his back to dispose of the 
chair. As Niles explains, the chair is like a baby‘s blanket and 
―There comes a time when it‘s the healthy thing to do to put these 
security objects aside.‖ Frasier‘s scheme not only puts him in the 
doghouse, but also, in a truly hilarious scene, his attempt to 
retrieve it lands him on stage performing in a high school 
production of Ten Little Indians. As always, in the end Frasier 
grows a little wiser and closer to his father, who explains his 
chair‘s sentimental value: it‘s where he was sitting when he 
watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and heard the news 
that he was a grandfather (Tropiano 2003b: 1).  
 
 Such personal moments were not only at the heart of the show‘s comic and dramatic 
formula, but also its clearest geographic message. The show‘s creators had, of course, worked on 
Cheers, which had been created by writers from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. None of these 
programs were exterior shows—just as Mary Tyler Moore focused on Mary‘s apartment and the 
WJM office, and Cheers spent most of its time in the bar, Frasier‘s universe was restricted 
primarily to the radio station, the coffee shop, and Frasier‘s apartment. Because of this, viewers 
had to learn most of their geography from the primary characters. So, while Frasier frequently 
referenced Seattle‘s obsession with caffeine, its dreary climate, and the woeful fate of its 
professional sports franchises, the central geographic message was that the city‘s style and 
sophistication, as embodied by Frasier, was superimposed upon a rough-and-tumble working-
583 
 
class town, as embodied by Martin. All told, the geography of Frasier was not inappropriate for 
a lumber-town-turned-technopole.    
According to Frasier‘s creators, the decision to relocate Frasier Crane to Seattle was 
consciously geographic, but not one based on the physical or cultural geography of the city. It 
was chosen, quite simply, because it was 4,000 miles from Boston. Producer David Lee recalled 
that ―the first thing NBC said to us when we pitched the show was, ‗How often will Norm, Cliff, 
and Woody stop by?‘ We said never.‖ As it happened, a few members from the Cheers gang did 
eventually make it on the show, but Lee and coproducer David Angell were able to limit such 
occurrences by their choice of setting. ―We wanted to avoid that constant breathing down our 
neck from the network every three weeks to get a Cheers person to stop by,‖ said Angell. ―If we 
were in Seattle, it wouldn‘t be as easy for them to get there‖ (Graham 1996: 19-20).  
Like its parent program, Frasier aired for eleven years. Only five sitcoms have had 
longer runs, and none have aired longer than the remarkable two decades that Kelsey Grammar 
played Frasier Crane, a lifespan for a fictional, live-action television character exceeded only by 
that of Gunsmoke‘s Matt Dillon. Unlike Cheers, Frasier never made it to the top spot on the 
Nielsen charts, but it was ranked in the top thirty each of its eleven seasons, including four years 
in the top ten. The show peaked in third place during the 1998-1999 season, and was a force 
when it came to industry awards. Frasier won a record-smashing thirty-seven Emmy awards, 
including five consecutive wins for Outstanding Comedy Series.  
While Frasier is clearly Washington‘s defining television program, the landscape of the 
state, in terms of total shows, has not been dominated by comedies. After Frasier‘s 1994 debut, 
only two more sitcoms—Dweebs and Romeo!—appeared. They were joined by Washington‘s 
584 
 
only reality entry in 1998, when the seventh installment of MTV‘s long-running The Real World 
checked into a Seattle waterfront apartment. All eighteen of Washington‘s dramatic entries have 
debuted since 1990, and they eventually outnumbered the state‘s comic entries by a nearly two-
to-one ratio.    
Like its sitcoms, most of Washington‘s dramas have proven to be lemons, including three 
short-lived family dramas. Under One Roof, a gritty portrayal of an African-American family 
sharing a home in Seattle, aired for a month in 1995. The lighter, but no more successful Cold 
Feet, which ran for a month in 1999, was a story of dating, marriage, and parenthood among six 
self-absorbed yuppies. Citizen Baines, which aired for six weeks in 2001, was the story of a 
divorced U. S. senator who, having lost his bid for a fourth term, returned home to Seattle and 
attempted to repair damaged relationships with his three adult daughters.  
Although a few lawyers and police officers have passed across Washington‘s television 
landscape, the state is almost completely absent of programs entirely devoted to either 
profession. The only exception was Traps, the story of a retired homicide detective named Joe 
Trapchek who still consulted on some cases, and who occasionally worked with his grandson, 
Chris, a rebellious young detective on the Seattle force. Traps was about as successful as most 
other conventional Seattle dramas, lasting just a month in 1994.  
The third element of television‘s iron triangle of policemen, lawyers, and medical 
professionals met a similar fate in Washington during the 1990s. First appearing in 1994, the 
syndicated, sex-drenched medical soap opera University Hospital, about four student nurses in 
fictional Seaside, Washington, lasted for less than six months. Medicine Ball, which was pulled 
585 
 
after six weeks, was a similarly soapy tale of a five young medical interns at Seattle‘s fictional 
Bayview Medical Center.  
Another Seattle-based medical drama, Grey‟s Anatomy, appeared in 2005, and its basic 
description read like a photocopy of Medicine Ball—the professional and personal lives of five 
young doctors, in this case surgical residents at Seattle Grace Hospital. Proving that the Nielsen 
gods are a fairly capricious bunch, however, Grey‟s Anatomy was not just a success, but a smash 
hit, checking in at fifth place during its first full season. Like its fast-paced medical counterpart, 
ER, everybody yelled and ran around, and medical crises and professional dilemmas abounded. 
But while ER had left the impression that Chicago was a frosty warzone where dedicated young 
professionals constantly battled their inner demons, Grey‟s Anatomy left the impression that, 
after hours, at least, Seattle was a nearly constant bacchanal—something suggested by the 
nicknames of two of the handsome male doctors, ―McDreamy‖ and ―McSteamy.‖  
That the show‘s two fundamental elements were work and sex was made clear in the 
opening credits—a scalpel morphed into a tube of red lipstick, an I.V. bag dripped into a martini 
glass—but most critics agreed that the emphasis was on the sex. ―Those people switch partners 
more often than square dancers,‖ observed critic Jeff Alexander. ―I started putting together a 
little diagram outlining who all has slept with whom, but it quickly started looking like an M. C. 
Escher drawing‖ (Alexander 2008: 122-123). Critic Samantha Bornemann agreed that Grey‟s 
Anatomy was ―a soap, not a hospital procedural,‖ arguing that this fact was made clear in the 
series‘ first two scenes:    
The pilot opens with Meredith Grey waking naked but not alone on 
the den floor of her mother‘s vacant home. She‘s late for her first 
day of work, and she can‘t remember the name of the man who just 
woke bare-ass-up beside her. ―Derek,‖ he says, proffering a 
handshake and a smile that says he‘s ready for another go. 
586 
 
―Goodbye, Derek,‖ she grins, rushing off to the shower. Next stop: 
Seattle Grace Hospital. Meredith slips in just in time for chief of 
surgery Richard Webber‘s dispassionate welcome to the interns. 
―The seven years you spend here as a surgical resident will be the 
best and worst of your life,‖ he says. ―Look around you. Say hello 
to your competition . . . . Eight of you will switch to an easier 
specialty. Five of you will crack under the pressure. Two of you 
will be asked to leave. This is your starting line. This is your arena. 
How well you play. That‘s up to you.‖ Melodramatic? Sure, but in 
a rousing, manipulating, on-with-the-show kind of way. This is 
television, not a trip to the doctor, after all. Let‘s have some fun. 
And Grey‟s Anatomy provides it (so long as you check any real-
life medical knowledge at the door) (Bornemann 2005b: 1). 
 
As odd as it may sound, Grey‟s Anatomy shared a structural similarity with Frasier. As 
mentioned, the action on Frasier primarily centered on just three locations. Likewise, the Grey‟s 
Anatomy‘s characters would put in their long, arduous hours at Seattle Grace, pop across the 
street to the Emerald City Bar for a cocktail, then head off to one bedroom or another. Like ER, 
life in the city was manifested by the patients who entered the hospital. Unlike ER, where the 
patients‘ stories often drove an episode, on Grey‟s Anatomy, according to Bornemann, the 
patients were simply ―wheeled in as excuses to get the leads into the OR or as metaphors for 
something Meredith and her newbie cohorts need to learn‖ (Bornemann 2005c: 1). Because of 
this, as was the case on Frasier, viewers of Grey‟s Anatomy learned about Seattle primarily from 
the action and words of the primary characters. The central geographic message, then, was that 
Seattle is populated primarily by good-looking, young, smart, ambitious professionals who were 
sexually liberated, and who were always happy to take advantage of that fact.   
Another notable trait of Grey‟s Anatomy was its ethnic diversity. This show, wrote critic 
Matthew Fogel, ―has differentiated itself by creating a diverse world of doctors—almost half the 
cast are men and women of color.‖ 
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The series creator, Shonda Rhimes, has conceived Seattle Grace as 
a frenetic, multicultural hub where racial issues take a back seat to 
the more pressing problems of hospital life. . . .As one of 
television‘s few black showrunners, [Rhimes] has created a show 
around her vision of diversity—one in which color is more 
description than definition . . . . Ms. Rhimes has also worked hard 
to extend diversity to her show‘s smallest roles. Determined not to 
have a program in which ―all the extras are white, except the lone 
janitor,‖ she has created one of the most colorful backgrounds in 
television, a hospital in which punked-out bike messengers and 
suffering Hasidim roam the corridors. ―Shonda's only rule is drug 
dealers and pimps cannot be black,‖ said Dr. Zoanne Clack, a 
black writer for the show (Fogel 2005: 1).  
 
Although a number of critics praised the show for its diversity, many found fault with its 
failure to tackle racial issues on a consistent basis. ―Cultural distinctions still exist, even if we 
don‘t feel that there is blatant racism in the workplace the way there once was,‖ said critic 
Donald Bogle. ―We don‘t want to see a racial or cultural problem every week, but at some point 
if you ignore them it becomes dishonest.‖ Other writers, such as Fogel, found the show‘s 
tendency to accept its cultural diversity as fact of life ―defiantly fresh for network television.‖ 
Whether Grey‟s Anatomy‘s treatment of racial issues was a problem or an asset, it did represent a 
marked departure from Chicago‘s ER and Boston‘s St. Elsewhere, where such themes were 
examined frequently. This represents an important, albeit subtle, geographic message—that 
Seattle is a youthful city with a fresh perspective. ―I‘m in my early 30‘s, and my friends and I 
don‘t sit around and discuss race,‖ said Shonda Rhimes. ―We‘re post-civil rights, post-feminist 
babies, and we take it for granted we live in a diverse world‖ (Fogel 2005: 1).  
Grey‟s Anatomy continued to be produced through 2010, and has been a perennial 
Nielsen favorite, making it Washington‘s most durable and popular drama. It was not, however, 
representative of the pervasive tone of most of the state‘s other dramatic entries. Few other 
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states‘ television landscapes have been so thoroughly dominated by a single genre as has 
Washington‘s. Eleven—more than forty percent—of the state‘s entries have been thrillers. With 
its large quantity of murder mystery, science fiction, and supernatural genres, Washington‘s 
television landscape of the 1990s and 2000s was crowded with corpses, murderers, clairvoyants, 
evil twins, eerie small towns, werewolves, space aliens, mysterious amnesiacs, and post-
apocalyptic bicycle messengers.   
The first, and most influential of Washington‘s darkly themed dramas was the 1990 
murder mystery, Twin Peaks. At first glance, the little mountain town of Twin Peaks was 
charming, picturesque, and normal as could be. Its principal industries were timber, controlled by 
the Packard Sawmill, and tourism, which focused on the imposing Great Northern lodge that 
overlooked majestic White Tail Falls. The town was noteworthy for hosting the Twin Peaks 
Passion Play and the Packard Timber Games, having the highest per capita doughnut 
consumption in the world, and for producing an undefeated high school football team in 1968. 
Local small businesses included Big Ed‘s Gas Farm, a bar called the Roadhouse, Horne‘s 
Department Store, and the Double R Diner, which served up some of the world‘s best pie and 
coffee. Beneath the picture postcard exterior, however, was what one critic called an ―eddying 
pool of sadism, Satanism, pornography and drugs‖ (Lewis and Stempel 1996: 113).  
The series began with the murder of Laura Palmer, a beautiful seventeen-year-old prom 
queen, whose body was found wrapped in plastic on the shores of Black Lake. The town‘s 
solemn sheriff, Harry S. Truman, called in the F. B. I., and Special Agent Dale Cooper was soon 
on the scene. Laura had last been seen at One-Eyed Jack‘s, a combination casino-whorehouse-
drug den located just across the Canadian border. Agent Cooper soon discovered that seemingly 
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wholesome Laura led a double life, and that this was just one of a twisted maze of dark secrets 
that haunted the town.     
 The primary storyline of the show, however, always took a backseat to style. The 
question of who killed Laura Palmer was merely a framing device for what critic Robert J. 
Thompson called ―the strangest goings-on ever portrayed on American entertainment television‖ 
(Thompson 1996: 155). The show‘s trademark was the incongruous coupling of an archetypal 
small town with dreamlike photography, a haunting musical score, absurdist dialogue, 
melancholy mood, and surreal plot twists. It was The Andy Griffith Show by Samuel Beckett. To 
begin, Agent Dale Cooper was not a typical fish-out-water character, but a sort of microcosm of 
the town itself. He was ludicrously straight-laced, constantly clad in a Bureau-issue black 
business suit, and his greatest lusts seemed to revolve around coffee and pie. His catch phrases, 
which became ―virtual mantras‖ among the shows rabid fans, were ―This must be where pies go 
when they die,‖ and ―Damn fine coffee. And hot!‖ (Lewis 1996: 113). He was also, like the 
town, just plain strange, a mystic whose detecting methods involved meditation and ESP. He 
narrated the show with sometimes cryptic messages delivered into a microcassette recorder, 
which he always addressed to ―Diane.‖ Over time, the viewer began to wonder whether Diane 
was an unseen secretary or, in fact, the name of his tape recorder. Whenever Cooper reached a 
dead end in the Laura Palmer case, he was always helped out by his dreams. These provided 
mysterious clues via a dancing midget in what appeared to be the garishly decorated waiting 
room to Hell. The show‘s other characters were, in the words of Brooks and Marsh ―hardly 
relatable, unless you happened to reside in an asylum‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 1441). These 
included, to name just a few, Benjamin Horne, a local businessman who recreated Civil War 
battles in his office; Nadine Hurley, a one-eyed, middle-aged woman who, thinking she was still 
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a teenager, became the star of the high school wrestling team; and Dr. Lawrence Jacoby, a 
spaced-out hippie and Laura‘s former psychiatrist, who might have been the craziest man in 
town. The most memorable of the supporting cast was Margaret Lanterman, better known as the 
Log Lady, who never left her house without her beloved Ponderosa pine log, which she spoke to 
and carried like a baby. The log, of course, had psychic powers. In the end, the search for 
Laura‘s killer led Cooper to Killer Bob, a ―malleable and apparently supernatural entity 
inhabiting the deep woods of the Pacific Northwest‖ (Sconce 2010: 1).  
While Twin Peaks shocked and fascinated millions of American viewers (initially, at 
least), fans of the show‘s cocreator, avant-garde filmmaker David Lynch, could hardly have been 
surprised. Lynch had been behind some of the strangest art-house favorites of the late 1970s and 
1980s, including Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and the Oscar-winning The Elephant Man. He was 
also the director of 1984‘s Dune, a big-budget, three-hour adaptation of the science fiction novel 
by Frank Herbert, which proved to be one of the biggest box office disasters of the year. 
Encouraged by Lynch‘s critical esteem, cult following, and partnership with Hill Street Blues 
veteran writer Mark Frost, but tempered by the limited appeal of Lynch‘s work, ABC originally 
scheduled Twin Peaks for a limited run in in the spring of 1990, ordering a two-hour pilot and 
seven additional episodes. Despite this handicap, the show was nominated for fourteen Emmys 
that first season. It was also named the year‘s best show by the Television Critic Association, and 
took home the esteemed Peabody Award. The pilot was the highest-rated TV movie of the year, 
and Time magazine called Twin Peaks ―the most hauntingly original work ever done for 
American TV‖ (Thompson 1996: 155).  
Twin Peaks‘s success was helped along by a considerable critical buzz that was heard 
even before the show premiered. Dale Cooper and his cohort graced scores of magazine covers 
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and soon the show developed a fanatical following, and spawned a franchise that included three 
books—an Access Guide to Twin Peaks, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, and The 
Autobiography of F. B. I. Special Agent Dale Cooper—an audio recording of Cooper‘s messages 
to Diane, and a best-selling soundtrack album.  ―Who killed Laura Palmer?‖ became, in the 
words of Robert J. Thompson, ―the biggest TV-inspired question since ‗Who Shot J. R.?‘‖ 
(Thompson 1996: 156).  
Surpisingly, the general viewing audience‘s fascination with Twin Peaks faded as quickly 
as it had emerged. This decline might have been the result of what television historian Jeffrey 
Sconce called ―the series‘ obstinate refusal to move toward a traditional resolution, coupled with 
its escalating sense of the bizarre.‖ It might also have been the fault of its network. After the 
stunning numbers from the pilot, which had aired on a Sunday night, ABC, in a move reeking of 
hubris, moved the show to Thursday nights, opposite Cheers and Beverly Hills 90210. While 
critical praise for the show continued to ring loudly, Twin Peaks was pulverized in the ratings. 
ABC renewed the show for a second season, but moved it to Saturday night, in vain hopes of 
attracting ―the program‘s quality demographics to a night usually abandoned by such audiences‖ 
(Sconce 2010: 1). It didn‘t work. ABC then shifted the show back to Thursdays, but the results 
were even worse. The final episode of Twin Peaks aired in June 1991, fourteen months and just 
thirty episodes after its stellar premiere. 
The show remained a cult favorite even after its demise. David Lynch released a film 
prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, in 1993 to the delight of the television show‘s loyal 
fans, who were evidently still talking about the series. Critic David Bianculli wrote that ―never 
before, in the history of television, had a program inspired so many millions of people to debate 
and analyze it so deeply and excitedly for so long a period‖ (Thompson 1996: 156). Libby 
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Gelman-Waxner, one of the few critics who was not a fan of the show, grudgingly acknowledged 
its cult following. She wrote that ―every time someone on the screen eats a piece of apple pie, 
you can hear a thousand students start typing their doctoral dissertations on ‗Twin Peaks: David 
Lynch and the Semiotics of Cobbler‘‖ (Lavery 1995: 14). This program also developed an 
international following, particularly in Japan, where the series was once aired, uninterrupted, in 
its entirety, and where package travel deals to the show‘s filming locations remain popular.    
When the Japanese fans of the show arrived in Washington, they may have noticed a few 
errors in the show‘s geography. A shot from the opening credits announced ―Welcome to Twin 
Peaks, population 51,201,‖ an inflated number given the apparent size of the town on the show 
(its producers later jokingly acknowledged that the sign was an error, stating that the real 
population was, in fact, 5,120.1). An even more glaring error was the fictional town‘s location, 
said by Agent Cooper to be five miles south of the Canadian border and twelve miles west of the 
state line—coordinates at serious odds with the town‘s apparent Cascade Mountains backdrop. 
That said, the exteriors on the show were authentic Washington. Much of the filming was done 
in Snoqualmie, with Snoqualmie Falls serving as the stand-in for White Tail Falls, and the Salish 
Lodge filling in for the Great Northern. The towns of Fall City, North Bend, and Preston also 
appeared on the show. The fictional town‘s famous title peaks are located near North Bend, and 
belong to Washington‘s Mount Si.     
 Twin Peaks‘s central geographic theme, other than its moody visual love affair with the 
Cascades, was quite simple, and not very different from Grace Metalious‘s view of New England 
as reflected in Peyton Place. The defining element of Twin Peaks, in the words of critics Jon E. 
Lewis and Penny Stempel, was David Lynch‘s ―fascination with the dark life behind the white 
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picket fences of smalltown America‖ (Lewis 1996: 113). This notion was supported by Lynch 
himself, who suggested that this look at the world was shaped by experience:   
My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, 
building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket 
fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it‘s supposed 
to be. But on the cherry tree there‘s this pitch oozing out—some 
black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I 
discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, 
there are always red ants underneath. (Lynch 2005: 10-11).  
 
Whether or not Twin Peaks had anything to do with the deluge of darkly themed, 
Washington-based thrillers that began to hit the airwaves in the mid-1990s is a matter of 
speculation, but its influence was plainly evident in a number of shows set across the country, 
including American Gothic, Picket Fences, Northern Exposure, and Push, Nevada. Dale Cooper 
also had a kindred spirit in The X-Files‘s Fox Mulder, another seemingly mild-mannered F. B. I. 
agent with a penchant for employing unusual methods to investigate strange cases. Although The 
X-Files was a D.C.-based show, a number of episodes were set in Washington state and a 1996 
spin-off of the show was among the first of the state‘s moody thrillers.  
Millennium was the story of Frank Black (an appropriate name given the show‘s bluntly 
dark tone), who had moved back to his hometown of Seattle after a decade with the F. B. I. 
Frank did freelance work for the local police, helping to solve gruesome local murders, but he 
was also part of the secretive Millennium Group, which was preparing for the ultimate battle 
between the forces of good and evil that was believed to be coming at the turn of the century. 
After two seasons in Seattle, Frank‘s work took him back to Washington, D. C., but there was no 
shortage of shadowy thrills in his absence. Another 1996 entry, The Sentinel, was the story of 
Jim Ellison, a former army officer who had spent eighteen months in the Peruvian wilderness 
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following a helicopter crash. During this time, Jim had developed into what the natives called a 
Sentinel—a spirit medium and clairvoyant with superhuman senses of hearing, vision, and 
smell—which he put to use as a detective for the Cascade, Washington, police department. 
Joined by sidekick Blair Sandburg, a graduate student in anthropology who had been studying 
the Sentinel mythology, Jim became a walking crime lab. The crimes in Cascade went on for 
three seasons. The less successful but similarly dark thriller Two also appeared in 1996. It was 
the story of Gus McClain, an English professor at a college in Seattle, whose life was turned 
upside down after the murder of his wife, Sara. As it happened, Gus had an evil twin named 
Booth (they had been adopted separately at birth), who was a homicidal maniac. He had 
murdered Sara as part of a killing spree and framed Gus for the crime. Gus therefore had to go on 
the run, searching for evidence to exonerate himself, all the while harassed by Booth and chased 
by a zealous F. B. I. agent named Terry Carter. A twisted twist on The Fugitive, the syndicated 
Two couldn‘t live up to its inspiration, lasting just twenty-four episodes.     
The mood of Washington-based dramas did not lighten in the 2000s. The supernaturally 
themed drama Wolf Lake was the story of a sullen cop named John Kanin, whose girlfriend Ruby 
had mysteriously disappeared. John tracked her to the picturesque little town of Wolf Lake, 
where nothing was quite as it seemed. The twist was that Ruby, her family, and nearly everyone 
else in town were werewolves. CBS pulled the show after five low-rated weeks. These episodes 
showed up on UPN the following spring, along with four previously unaired installments. The 
similarly unsuccessful Glory Days, which aired for two months in 2002, was something of a 
cross between Twin Peaks and Murder, She Wrote. It was the story of washed-up mystery 
novelist Mike Dolan, who had recently returned to his picturesque hometown of Glory Island, 
Washington. His sister, Sara, who ran the local newspaper, gave Mike a job, and he spent his 
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spare time helping Sheriff Rudy Dunlop solve mysterious murders and other strange crimes, of 
which little Glory Island seemed to have more than its share.     
As mentioned, a number of Washington-based programs, from Here Come the Brides to 
Twin Peaks to Wolf Lake, have featured protagonists who were new in town. That theme was 
repeated on the thrillers John Doe, The 4400, and Kyle XY. The new wrinkle was that, unlike 
previous Washington newcomers, these protagonists had no idea where they had been. That was 
the case on 2002‘s John Doe, in which the title character awoke naked on Seattle‘s Horseshoe 
Island with no knowledge of who he was. He seemed to know just about everything else, 
however, possessing a superhuman intelligence that he soon put to good use. He made a killing 
on the stock market and befriended Frank, a Seattle cop, who found John‘s skills useful in 
solving crimes. In a cliffhanger season finale, John came close to discovering his true identity, 
but FOX left the show‘s few viewers in a lurch by failing to pick up John Doe for a second 
season.  
A similarly themed sci-fi mystery series, Kyle XY, premiered in 2006 and lasted for three 
seasons. It was the story of a young man who was found wandering the streets of Seattle (naked, 
of course) with no knowledge of who he was or how he got there. He was taken in by Nicole 
Trager, a psychologist, and her husband Stephen, a software developer, who soon discovered that 
shy Kyle possessed superhuman physical abilities. Many of the early stories examined everyday 
human dramas through Kyle‘s wide eyes, while later shows focused on Kyle‘s search for his true 
identity which, as one might expect, led back to a series of shady experiments conducted by a 
covert organization.  
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The science fiction drama The 4400, which premiered in 2004, upped the ante of 
amnesiacs to 4,400. In the pilot episode, a huge glowing sphere quietly deposited the title bunch 
in the foothills of Mt. Rainier. Unlike John Doe and Kyle, they knew who they were (and were 
fully clothed, for a change), but they did not know how they had gotten there. Eventually, they 
discovered that they were all U. F. O. abductees who had disappeared, one by one, over the 
previous six decades. None of them had aged, and they did not remember their abductions. The 
series, which aired for three seasons, followed this group as they attempted to return to their 
lives, all the while searching for truth about their time away. Inevitably the abductees began 
developing superhuman powers and a secretive government organization called NTAC (the 
National Threat Assessment Command) was charged with controlling them.  
Although amnesia was not involved, similar themes could be found in Dark Angel, a 
science-fiction series that premiered in 2000 and aired for two seasons. Set in 2019 in post-
apocalyptic Seattle, it was the story of a young woman, Max Guevara. Max was a bicycle 
messenger for Jam Pony X-Press and, like so many of her Washington television peers, was also 
a genetically enhanced mutant with extraordinary powers. She had escaped from a mysterious 
government program, Project Manticore, and Max and was relentlessly pursued by an evil 
government agent named Michael Lydecker. Another science-fiction entry, Level 9, cast a 
secretive government organization in a positive light for a change. It was the story of Annie 
Price, a former F. B. I. agent who had formed the title team of supernerds. Based in Seattle, 
Annie and her colleagues used high-tech equipment and computer knowledge to combat all 
manner of cybercrime. The ―geeks with guns‖ premise was unique, but it failed to attract an 
audience, lasting just three months of the 2000-2001 season (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 784).     
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Why should dramas greatly outnumber sitcoms among Washington‘s entries? Perhaps 
Seattle‘s reputation for long, dark winters and overcast skies lent a gloomy atmosphere that 
drama writers found intriguing, or perhaps these people were influenced by the melancholy 
nature of Seattle‘s much-hyped grunge music of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In her review of 
Wolf Lake, critic Cynthia Fuchs definitely saw the show‘s dark atmosphere as an extension of the 
regional culture. She wrote that ―Wolf Lake is seriously disturbed and disturbing, conjuring up 
the visual fragmentation and guitar-driven raging for which its Pacific Northwest setting is, 
indeed, rather famous—you know, the home of serial killing, grunge rock, Starbucks‖ (Fuchs 
2010c: 1). The nihilistic, melancholic musings of Dark Angel‘s protagonist Max Guevara 
appeared to be torn directly from the Seattle grunge rock playbook. In one episode, she said:   
They used to say that one nuclear bomb could ruin your whole day. 
That was sort of a joke before those terrorist bozos whacked us 
with an electromagnetic pulse from eighty miles up. You always 
hear people yapping here about how it was all different before the 
pulse, the land of milk and honey, blah blah blah blah, with plenty 
of food and jobs, things actually worked. I was too young to 
remember, so, whatever . . . .  America really thought they had it 
dialed in, money hangin‘ out the butt. But it was all just a bunch of 
ones and zeroes in a computer someplace. So when that bomb went 
kablooey and turned all those ones and zeroes into plain old zeroes, 
everyone‘s like no way! America‘s just another broke ex-super-
power looking for a handout and wondering why‖ (Fuchs 2010d).   
 
A more immediate explanation for Washington‘s dark television mood was the influence 
of Twin Peaks and The X-Files. A number of the later thrillers drew direct comparison to these 
two standard bearers. Fuchs wrote that ―it‘s clear that Wolf Lake has visions of Twin Peaks . . . 
dancing in its head,‖ adding that the lead character, John Kanin, had ―moments where he sounds 
a lot like . . . much-missed Agent Dale Cooper‖ (Fuchs 2010b: 1). Critic Tobias Peterson 
observed that although ―the titular character of John Doe may not work for the FBI, his story and 
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the rest of the show owe a lot to the marginalized-protagonist-on-a-quest-for-answers model 
made popular by The X-Files‘ Fox Mulder‖ (Peterson 2002: 1). As for the show that started it all, 
Twin Peaks cocreator David Lynch has suggested that the Washington setting was not incidental, 
but chosen for the mood created by the physical landscape of the Cascades.  ―Just sort of picture 
this kind of darkness,‖ said Lynch, ―and this wind going through the needles of the Douglas firs, 
and you start getting a little bit of a mood coming along‖ (Golden 1996: 320).  
Still a third explanation for the dark tone of so many Washington entries is simple 
economics. Programs from the science fiction, supernatural, and thriller genres often generate an 
intensely loyal but rather narrow fan base, a fact exemplified by the mediocre ratings for such 
iconic programs as The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and Twin Peaks. Even the paranormal/sci-fi 
juggernaut The X-Files never ranked higher than nineteenth in the Nielsen ratings during its long 
run. Increasingly, programs of this nature fill the same niche as shows with predominantly black 
casts. Both types of programs, though shunned by the major networks because of their often 
limited appeal, are embraced by struggling networks because they can guarantee a dedicated 
following. The television landscape of Washington provides a good example. Most of the state‘s 
conventional dramas appeared on one of the Big Three networks—Under One Roof, Citizen 
Baines, and Traps on CBS, Cold Feet on NBC, and Grey‟s Anatomy on ABC. Nearly all of the 
―thriller‖ entries, however, appeared elsewhere. FOX broadcast Millennium, Dark Angel, and 
John Doe. Wolf Lake started on CBS, but finished on UPN, which was also the home of Sentinel 
and Level 9. Glory Days aired on the WB network, The 4400 on cable‘s USA network, and Kyle 
XY on cable‘s ABC Family, while Two was produced for syndication. Only one Washington-
based drama from the thriller category, Twin Peaks, appeared on a Big Three network. 
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Because these thriller programs appeared on networks with lower ratings and, therefore, 
lower advertising revenues, they were forced to film on tighter budgets. Numerous ways exist to 
trim a program‘s production budget, of course, but beginning in the 1990s, one of the most 
popular was to head north. By 1996, numerous American film and television companies were 
shooting in Canada, taking advantage of both cheap labor and the weak Canadian dollar. That 
year, Hollywood ―maquila‖ productions spent $320 million in Canada, accounting for nearly 
sixty percent of the entire $542 million Canadian film and television industry. The next year, the 
Canadian government introduced the Film or Video Production Services Tax Credit, which 
offered companies a tax credit of eleven percent of wages paid to Canadian employees of 
productions filmed in the country. By 1998, Hollywood maquila production in Canada had 
jumped to $834 million, accounting for seventy percent of the Canadian film and video industry 
(McIntosh 2008: 1). 
The X-Files was a relatively early arrival in Canada. Filming for the show‘s pilot was 
scheduled for March of 1993 and, according to series creator Chris Carter, he had originally 
intended to shoot in Los Angeles. Production was shifted to British Columbia, however, because 
the episode was set in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, and Carter wanted to ―go where the 
good forests are.‖ Ultimately, the first several seasons of The X-Files were filmed almost 
exclusively in the Vancouver area, and Carter and his team were not alone. When The X-Files set 
up shop at the studios of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Vancouver, twenty other 
American television programs already were shooting in the city. Fifty-one percent of all foreign 
productions in Canada are filmed in British Columbia, partly because of the city‘s proximity to 
Hollywood and, according to Carter, because Vancouver ―has the advantage of being able to 
visually approximate almost any city in North America‖ (Lowry 1995: 17). Of course, the most 
600 easily approximated area of the United States for a Vancouver production is the Pacific 
Northwest. As long as the Canadian film maquiladoras are cost-effective, it is likely that 
Washington will be well represented on the American television landscape, particularly in shows 
that feature gruesome murders, eerie lights in the night sky, and genetically enhanced humans 
running from shadowy government agencies.  
 
IDAHO 
Although it avoided the dubious distinction of being the only state not to serve as the 
setting for a primetime television program, Idaho‘s lone entry might well deserve an asterisk. 
The Manhunter, which aired during the 1974-1975 season, spent much of its run with the lead 
character out of the state. Set in the 1930s, it was the story of Dave Barrett, a farmer and former 
marine whose friends had been killed by bank robbers. He pursued the culprits, and other 
infamous gangsters, around the country, only occasionally returning to visit his family in Idaho.  
 
WYOMING 
The geographic message of Wyoming‘s television landscape is thoroughly unambiguous. 
Its three successful entries were gimmick-free, straightforward, nineteenth-century westerns 
where the motif of a strong, ruggedly independent man taming a wild land was fired right down 
the middle of the plate. The Lawman premiered in 1958, and was the story of Marshal Dan Troop 
and his deputy, Johnny McKay. In the second season, Lily Merrill was added for a bit of flavor, 
but The Lawman was as uncomplicated as a Western could get, with Brooks and Marsh noting 
that there were ―no tricks or gimmicks . . . just simple stories of desperadoes brought to justice 
by the long, stern arm of the law‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 774). The show was mildly 
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successful, peaking in the fifteenth spot in the Nielsen ratings during its second season, and 
charting in the top thirty for the first three of its four seasons.  
Wyoming‘s second entry, Laramie, arrived in 1959 and was similarly straightforward. 
Set in the 1870s, Laramie told about the young Sherman brothers, who had been running the 
family‘s struggling ranch since their father had been shot and killed by a land-grabber. Laramie‟s 
Sherman brothers were joined by Jonesy, an old family friend, and Jess, a drifter who the boys 
persuaded to help run the ranch. When the actor playing the younger Sherman brother left the 
series, he was replaced by Mike Williams, a young man who had been orphaned in an Indian 
raid. The Sherman Ranch raised cattle and served as a way station on the stagecoach line out of 
Laramie, which permitted more than a few outlaws and distressed travellers to pass through the 
series. The sheriff of Laramie eventually became a regular, as did Daisy Cooper, who arrived to 
serve as a housekeeper and stand-in mom for the boys. While never a hit, Laramie had a 
respectable run, ending after four seasons in 1963. 
The sorts of characteristics that viewers expected of a 1960s television western hero were 
clearly indicated in the creative history of Wyoming‘s most successful series. By 1946, the 
classic 1902 Owen Wister novel, The Virginian, had been adapted for the big screen four times. 
The first, in 1914, was directed by D. W. Griffith, and the last two featured the likes of Gary 
Cooper and Joel McCrea in the lead roles. An attempt to bring the story to the small screen in the 
late 1950s, however, was a flop. Brooks and Marsh note that the initial pilot portrayed the title 
character as ―a Western dandy replete with shiny hunting boots, skintight pants, lace cuffs, and a 
tiny pistol‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2001: 1,473). The series did not test well, and was not picked up. 
A second attempt, in 1962, was made without the preening and dandyish affectations, and this 
second Virginian became a classic. This time around the title character was gritty, brusque, 
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enigmatic, and nameless, and kept the peace on the Shiloh Ranch in the 1890s. This spread had a 
succession of owners, but the one constant was the Virginian‘s sidekick, Trampas, a rowdy 
young ranch hand. A literate, gimmick-free program, The Virginian was a part of the adult 
western movement that had also given rise to Gunsmoke and Bonanza. The ninety-minute 
program was Wyoming‘s longest-running entry, and a staple of NBC‘s Wednesday night line-up 
for nine years. It charted in the Nielsen top thirty during its first seven seasons, peaking in the 
tenth spot during its fifth year. 
Just as The Virginian exemplified what made a western successful, Wyoming‘s final 
entry exemplified what could kill one. The Monroes, which was filmed on location in the Grand 
Teton National Park, told the story of six orphaned children struggling to make a living in the 
rugged 1870s. The parents of the title orphans, who ranged in age from six to eighteen, had 
drowned en route to their new ranch. The kids‘ chief ally was a renegade Indian named Dirty 
Jim, while their chief adversary was Major Mapoy, an evil English cattle baron who was trying 
to steal their land. Lacking a conventionally rugged, masculine lead, this Western never caught 
on, and was cancelled after running the 1966-1967 season.    
 
UTAH 
Utah has served as the backdrop for three television programs. Just one of them lasted 
more than a year, but the state does have the distinction of having all of its programs filmed on 
location. Television came to Utah, quite literally, with Donny & Marie, a squeaky-clean variety 
show featuring the title brother-and-sister duo and, at one point, twenty-six other members of the 
Osmond family. The Osmonds had been mainstays of the variety show circuit for years, and their 
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own show debuted from Hollywood in January 1976. It was a minor hit, checking in at twenty-
sixth on the Nielsen charts during the 1975-1976 season, but the Osmonds were homesick, and in 
1977 moved the show to their hometown of Orem, Utah. To accommodate production, the 
Osmonds built a $2.5 million studio facility and the show actually became more lavish than it 
had been in California. It remained, however, an odd mixture of Hollywood schmaltz and 
wholesome family entertainment. The first Orem broadcast, for example, found room for both 
the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and bawdy comedian Paul Lynde. In the end, the show never 
drew huge audiences, and production ended in May of 1979. It remains, however, the defining 
television image for Utah, with the good-natured, toothy-grinned, teeny-bopping Osmonds 
leaving an impression distinctly different from the state‘s rough-and-tumble, cow-punching 
neighbors. And Orem has not been entirely shorn of its celebrity status, as the old Donny & 
Marie production facility now serves as a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center catering, in part, 
to Hollywood stars. 
Utah returned to television for a pair of short-lived entries in the 1990s. The title of The 
Boys of Twilight was a double entendre (a clean one), referring both to the show‘s setting and the 
age of its two stars, Hollywood veterans Richard Farnsworth and Wilford Brimley. They played 
Cody McPherson and Bill Huntoon, a long-tenured sheriff and his chief deputy, in the quiet 
mountain town of Twilight. A contemporary cop show with Old West elements, the program‘s 
running theme was conflict between the town‘s long-time residents and jet-setting city slickers 
who were trying to turn Twilight into a playground for the wealthy. Ratings for the show were 
dismal, and CBS pulled the plug after four weeks in 1992. With age and wisdom having failed in 
Utah, ABC returned in 1995 with youth and beauty. Extreme, which ran for seven weeks in 
1995, focused on Reese Wheeler, the leader of the courageous Steep Mountain Rescue Group of 
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Park City. This show was essentially a high-altitude version of Baywatch, with most of the 
episodes focusing on daring rescues and the romantic entanglements of the handsome young 
crew. Extreme did have one thing in common with The Boys of Twilight. The chief recurring 
villain on the show, as is often the case on contemporary westerns, was a conniving developer 
bent on destroying Utah‘s unspoiled beauty.    
 
NEW MEXICO 
Of the eleven programs representing New Mexico, six were set in the days of the Old 
West. Some offered twists on the familiar formula, but, in general, they stuck with the central 
theme of a righteous man standing up to injustice on a wild and harsh frontier. Of the state‘s five 
contemporary entries, four had a distinctly western flavor, while a fifth took advantage of the 
state‘s reputation for being a favorite destination for extraterrestrials.    
The state‘s first entry was also its most successful, and by a wide margin. Entering the 
television landscape with a tidal wave of westerns in 1958, The Rifleman was the story of 
homesteader and crack shot Lucas McCann, a widower who lived with his son on a struggling 
ranch near North Fork in the 1880s. North Fork was plagued, as might be expected, by outlaws, 
and the town marshal often called on Lucas and his modified Winchester rifle to help out when 
things got dicey. The Rifleman entered the television schedule like a shot, ranking fourth on the 
Nielsen charts in its first year. It maintained respectable numbers for three more seasons, but 
gradually sank down the charts and into oblivion after its sixth and final year, the 1962-1963 
season. It remains the longest-running show set in New Mexico, and the only one to break into 
the Nielsen top thirty.  
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 Four more New Mexico-based traditional Westerns appeared during The Rifleman‘s run, 
but none were especially successful. Black Saddle and Law of the Plainsman premiered in 1959, 
but both were off the air in 1960. Set in the territorial days shortly after the Civil War, Black 
Saddle concerned a former gunfighter who was trying to stay on the right side of the law. To that 
end, he became an attorney, slung law books over his saddle, and roamed about the territory 
helping those in need. Law of the Plainsman, a Rifleman spin-off, told the story of Deputy U. S. 
Marshal Sam Buckhart. The twist here was that Sam was an Apache who had gone off to 
Harvard, where he acquired a ―tremendous respect for the white man‘s laws and the U. S. 
Constitution‖ (Brooks and Marsh, 2007: 773). Returning to the wild territory of his birth, Sam 
attempted to balance his desire to help his fellow Native Americans with his duties as a lawman.  
 The Tall Man, which debuted in 1960 and aired for two years, was a fictionalized account 
of two very real western characters. Sheriff Pat Garrett, whose fairness and integrity had earned 
him the title nickname, was struggling to maintain law and order in 1870s New Mexico. His best 
friend was a troubled young gunfighter named William H. ―Billy the Kid‖ Bonney. Although 
their respective career paths occasionally put them at odds, they remained close friends, and 
Billy often helped out Pat when he knew it was the right thing to do. That show was followed in 
1961 by a paint-by-numbers western called Gunslinger, which aired for seven months. Also set 
in 1870s, it chronicled the efforts of the title hero to maintain the peace from his base in Fort 
Scott. The last New Mexico entry with an Old West flavor was the teenage western The 
Cowboys, another show set in the 1870s. Airing for just under six months in 1974, it chronicled 
the efforts of seven young men to help a widow run a ranch. 
 New Mexico‘s first program with a contemporary setting was also its only sitcom. 
Guestward Ho!, which premiered in 1960 and lasted for one year, was a fish-out-water story 
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with a western flavor. It seemed that the Hooten family, fed up with life in New York City, 
decided to buy the title New Mexico dude ranch, sight unseen. The ranch turned out to be, as 
might be expected, a complete wreck, and the show chronicled their attempts at rehabilitatation 
and adjustment to life out west. A memorable supporting character from the series was Hawkeye, 
who owned the only store near the ranch. A Native American, Hawkeye was considerably less 
menacing and much less earnest than most of his television counterparts. An indigenous Ernie 
Bilko, Hawkeye read the Wall Street Journal, sold ―authentic‖ Indian knickknacks that had been 
made in Japan, and was willing to do almost anything to make a quick buck. Still, unlike many 
of television‘s other ―civilized‖ Indians, Hawkeye was more than a little dubious about the white 
man‘s presence in New Mexico. In the words of one critic, he was ―bound and determined to 
find a way to return the country to its rightful owners, his people‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 
568). 
 Another contemporary entry, Empire, aired for two seasons beginning in 1962. Its main 
character was Jim Redigo, foreman of the half-million acre Garret Ranch, which was a sort of 
updated version of Bonanza‘s Ponderosa. In addition to managing the ranch‘s vast livestock, 
crop, mining, oil, and timber interests, Redigo seemingly served as the area‘s lone representative 
for truth and justice, making him a kindred spirit to many other highly principled loners on 
television‘s westerns. On one episode, for example, Redigo stood up for a ranch hand who had 
been falsely accused of murder. When the jury returned an unpopular verdict of not guilty, 
businessmen cancelled contracts with the Garret Ranch, and all of the other employees 
threatened to walk out rather than work with a murderer. Redigo stuck to his guns, however, and 
offered his resignation, saying that ―integrity and principles fall in the category of luxury items. 
If you can‘t afford them yourself, don‘t expect anyone else to foot the bill‖ (Lichter, Lichter, and 
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Rothman 1991: 119). Eventually the supposed murderer was exonerated, life returned to normal, 
and Redigo held no grudges against those who had challenged him. Such actions suggested that, 
unlike the contemporary Colorado of Dynasty or Texas of Dallas, the values of the Old West still 
mattered in New Mexico.        
Empire was followed in 1971 by The Man and the City. Filmed on location in 
Albuquerque, the show aired for a season and a half, and was New Mexico‘s first entry with a 
modern urban setting. It was also one of the first television dramas to feature a Mexican-
American lead actor and protagonist, with Anthony Quinn playing Mayor Thomas Jefferson 
Alcala. In the words of one critic, ―Anthony Quinn played Alcala as a kind of Zorba the 
Hispanic, exuding charismatic vitality from every pore as he rushed around governing and 
empathizing‖ (Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman 1991: 239). Much like Empire, this political drama 
infused Old West ideals into its contemporary setting, featuring a character whose sense of moral 
righteousness was not far removed from that of Empire‘s Jim Redigo or, for that matter, 
Gunsmoke‘s Matt Dillon or Bonanza‘s Ben Cartwright. This meant that Mayor Alcala often 
found himself fighting lonely crusades. On one 1971 episode, a police officer was shot and killed 
in a predominantly Hispanic section of the city. Subsequently, Alcala discovered that the police 
were holding suspects, most of them Hispanic and without any demonstrable connection to the 
shooting, without charge or the aid of legal counsel. Our hero immediately ordered their release, 
angrily reprimanding his police chief, Wheeler, with the line, ―You can‘t suspend the law . . . . In 
my city we go by the rules.‖ Chief Wheeler then ordered a curfew for the barrio, prompting the 
following exchange:  
ALCALA: Doesn‘t the curfew restrain freedom? 
WHEELER: It‘s good for the community. 
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ALCALA: Do they willingly give up the freedom and really have a 
choice? 
WHEELER: The curfew is inconvenient but necessary. 
ALCALA: Isn‘t law and order without justice meaningless? (Lichter, 
Lichter, and Rothman 1991: 264).  
 
In the end, Alcala himself helped track down the cop killer. As had been the case with Jim 
Redigo a decade earlier, Tom Alcala was vindicated, justice was served, and New Mexico‘s Old 
West virtues survived.   
Also filmed on location in Albuquerque, the 1974 action series Nakia was a modern-day 
version of Law of the Plainsman. This show focused on Nakia Parker, who was trying to 
reconcile his responsibilities as a deputy sheriff with loyalty to his fellow Native Americans. 
That dilemma often arose, of course, as he dealt with scheming white politicians and frequent 
violence on the reservation. As was the case with Law of the Plainsman, the show failed to catch 
on with viewers. It was cancelled after three months, and marked, at least for now, the end of the 
New Mexico western.  
Nearly a quarter century passed before New Mexico reemerged on American television. 
The new entry, Roswell, which debuted in 1999, was quite different in tone from the state‘s 
western-flavored entries. It mixed the science fiction and government-conspiracy elements of 
The X-Files with the teen soap of shows such as Dawson‟s Creek. The protagonists were three 
teenage aliens—Max, Isabel, and Michael—who had been abandoned on earth in 1959. They had 
remained in incubation for three decades, emerging as seemingly normal, six-year-old earthlings 
in 1989. Mixed in with the usual youth-soap elements of identity crises, love triangles, and 
familial conflicts were the teens‘ search for truth. They tried to discover why they had been left 
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on earth, all the time dodging evil alien bounty hunters and shadowy government figures bent on 
tracking them down.     
 Roswell appeared on the lowly WB network before moving to the even lowlier UPN, so it 
never garnered big ratings. It did, nevertheless, remain on the air for three seasons, the first New 
Mexico-based program to do so since The Rifleman. Roswell, an actual city of about 40,000 in 
the southeastern part of the state, was made famous by a series of UFO sightings in 1947. These 
sightings, and the supposed crash of an alien craft, have made the area a favorite with UFO 
enthusiasts.  
 
ARIZONA 
Eleven of Arizona‘s twenty-three entries were set in the Old West, and the western genre 
dominated the state‘s television landscape during the 1950s and 1960s. Another two programs 
were contemporary spins on the western, including the state‘s first entry, Sky King, which 
debuted in 1953 and aired for one season. The title hero, who apparently had no other name, was 
a rancher who opted for a twin-engine Cessna instead of a horse to have adventures, solve crises, 
and fight the bad guys. Arizona‘s second modern-day Western was the syndicated program The 
Sheriff of Cochise, which produced 156 episodes from 1956 to 1960. This program bore a strong 
resemblance to its syndicated contemporary, Highway Patrol, a straightforward mixture of car 
chases and brawls with criminals. The hero was blunt tough guy Frank Morgan, sheriff of the 
title (and actual) county in southeastern Arizona. Not enough crime existed in and around 
Bisbee, however, so in 1958 Morgan became a U. S. Marshal, allowing him to chase criminals 
all over the state. 
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The first of Arizona‘s Old West entries was The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, which 
premiered in 1954. The setting was the real Fort Apache, Arizona, near the fictional town of 
Mesa Grande. Its two primary characters were a young orphan named Rusty, whose parents had 
been killed in an Indian raid, and his faithful German shepherd. The two had been taken in by 
soldiers at the fort, and their adventures revolved around attempts to maintain law and order in 
the wild territory.  The title pooch was first seen on film in the 1920s, and was heard on 
occasional radio serials from 1930 to 1955. The television version ran five seasons and was the 
first Arizona program to break into the Nielsen top thirty, checking in at the twenty-third position 
during its first year on the air. Unlike Lassie, its more peaceful counterpart, Rin Tin Tin was full 
of violent action, including gun battles with outlaws, raging rivers, and ravenous wolves. The 
most common threat, and the most perilous, were the Apaches, generally depicted here as 
primitive, bloodthirsty savages.  
Broken Arrow, which premiered in 1956 and aired for two seasons, took a markedly 
different view of Native Americans. The protagonist was army officer Tom Jeffords, who was 
charged with keeping the peace in the Apache country of Arizona, and who had adopted the 
―novel approach of making friends with the Indians instead of shooting at them‖ (Brooks and 
Marsh 2007: 186). Jeffords was soon welcomed into the native community, and became blood 
brother to the Apache Chief, Cochise. They then worked together to combat renegade Indians 
and treacherous white men alike.    
Seventy-eight episodes of the syndicated series 26 Men were produced from 1957 to 
1959. Although it was a fairly standard action series, the show possessed some measure of 
authenticity. It was filmed on location in Arizona, and residents of Tucson and Phoenix appeared 
in small roles. It was also inspired by real events, chronicling the adventures of a twenty-six man 
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militia that had been recruited in 1901 to establish law and order on the frontier. Years later, one 
of the members of this force recounted that ―the reason there was only twenty-six of us was 
because the Territory couldn‘t afford no more‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 1,438).   Another set of 
heroes tried to tame the Wild West in Tombstone Territory, which aired intermittently from 1957 
to 1959. They were lawman Clay Hollister and crusading newspaper editor Harris Claiborne, and 
the show was set, as its title suggests, in Tombstone, ―the town too tough to die‖ (Brooks and 
Marsh 2007: 1,402).  
Even after Tombstone Territory left the air, the town hung around. Having spent the 
previous four seasons in Dodge City, Kansas, the title lawman of The Life and Legend of Wyatt 
Earp moved to Arizona at the start of the 1959-1960 season. Once in Tombstone, Earp 
encountered Old Man Clanton, a local strongman who had built an empire bilking money from 
townspeople and running guns across the Mexican border. Clanton had the town sheriff in his 
pocket, and a gang of gun-slinging thugs to enforce his will. Earp took on the whole gang. 
Adding a feminine touch was Nellie Cashman, who, as was apparently required in television 
westerns, operated the local saloon, the Birdcage. Wyatt Earp aired for two seasons after its 
move to Arizona, with the final five episodes leading up to the famous gun battle at the O. K. 
Corral.  
Like its counterpart, Gunsmoke, Wyatt Earp signaled a shift in the Western genre toward 
more complex characters and themes, and, theoretically at least, a more realistic depiction of the 
West. That shift was certainly evident in Arizona‘s next four entries. Johnny Ringo, which aired 
during the 1959-1960 season, was set in Velardi, and was based, albeit very loosely, on an actual 
outlaw-turned-lawman. The Deputy was set in Silver City during the 1880s, with the title 
character being a young shopkeeper named Clay McCord. Clay was a crack shot, but he 
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abhorred violence, and avoided using gunplay whenever possible. He was, nevertheless, often 
called to service, as the town‘s aging U. S. Marshal, Herk Lamson, had trouble upholding the 
law on his own.  The Deputy premiered in 1959 and aired for two seasons, helped along by the 
star power of Henry Fonda, who served as narrator, and who occasionally appeared as Chief 
Marshal Simon Fry. Common themes included the conflict between the pacifist Clay and the 
more aggressive Fry, who believed that violence was an unfortunate necessity in the fight for 
order. The Deputy also highlighted conflicts between the town‘s younger and older generations, 
who had different perspectives on Silver City‘s future development.  
The two Arizona Westerns that appeared in 1967 were similarly complex. Based on a 
Louis L‘Amour story and the 1953 John Wayne movie of the same name, Hondo, which aired 
for four months, was the story of Hondo Lane, a former Confederate captain turned cavalry 
officer. He served at Fort Lowell in the 1870s. While all the usual western elements were there—
corrupt land barons, outlaws, and treacherous Indians—Hondo was not the typical strong-armed 
and straight-laced western hero. Having witnessed the death of his Apache bride in an army 
massacre, Hondo had become a bitter loner, joining the cavalry with the aim of preventing 
further violence. The High Chaparral, which aired for four seasons, was set on the title ranch in 
1870s Arizona. The spread was owned and operated by the Cannon brothers, who were a study 
in contrasts. John, the older, was stolid, industrious, and ambitious, determined to carve an 
empire out the wild landscape. His brother Buck was an easygoing hell-raiser, who could 
―outdrink, outshoot, outfight, and when properly motivated outwork any man alive‖ (Brooks and 
Marsh 2007: 610). Threats came from natural disasters, outlaws, cattle rustlers, and Native 
Americans, but High Chaparral was not a typical shoot-‗em-up Western. Like Bonanza, it was 
what some critics called a ―saddle soap,‖ focusing as much on interpersonal relationships as it 
613 
 
did on adventure. What made The High Chaparral even more distinctive is its handling of ethnic 
issues. Although it was set in what one critic called ―Indian-infested‖ Arizona (John Cannon‘s 
first wife was, in fact, killed by Apaches in the pilot episode), High Chaparral generally adopted 
a sympathetic view of Native Americans (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 610). It was also one of the 
first television Westerns to feature Hispanic characters in significant, recurring roles. John‘s 
second wife was Victoria Montoya, daughter and heiress of cattle baron Don Sebastian Montoya, 
and the relationship between the two families was used as a vehicle for examining cultural 
differences and conflicts between Americans and Mexicans.  
Television‘s fascination with the traditional western began to wane considerably in the 
1970s, and that is reflected in Arizona‘s entries. Just two Westerns followed The High 
Chaparral, both featuring James Garner, and neither especially successful. The nature of 
Garner‘s characters in these series, and their poor performance, suggests much about what 
viewers look for in a western television hero. The title of 1971‘s Nichols referred to both its 
setting—fictional Nichols, Arizona, in 1914—and its lead character, who was never given a first 
name. Having retired after eighteen years in the Army, Nichols returned to the small town that 
had been founded by his family. Nichols (the town) was in the grip of Ma Ketcham, head of a 
formidable and greedy clan, and she soon had Nichols (the man) in her grip as well. She coerced 
him into serving as the town sheriff so that she could keep him in view. That he was likely to be 
shot dead in the process was an added bonus, and in the season finale Nichols was, indeed, 
gunned down. Nichols had not been a conventional western hero. He abhorred violence, refused 
to carry a gun, and spent most of his time cooking up various money-making schemes. After his 
untimely demise, an identical twin brother (also played by Garner) rode into town to avenge the 
death. This represented a last-ditch effort to salvage the show. ―By replacing the avaricious 
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Nichols with his stronger, more traditionally heroic twin brother,‖ wrote Brooks and Marsh, ―it 
was felt that next season‘s program would be more successful‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 984). 
Whether or not it would have worked will never be known, as NBC chose not to renew the show.       
A decade later, James Garner returned in Arizona‘s final Western to date, Bret Maverick. 
Set in the 1880s in the town of Sweetwater, this program was an update of Maverick, the popular 
satirical western that ran from 1957 to 1962. In the earlier version, Garner‘s Bret Maverick had 
been a breezy, wisecracking cardsharp who roamed the frontier looking for poker games and 
getting into scrapes in rough little western towns with names like Apocalypse and Oblivion. In 
the 1981 version, both the lead character and the setting were more polished. Bret had now 
settled down on his own ranch, and was part owner of a saloon. The town was working to ―shed 
its untamed rural western image‖ and Bret Maverick had become a ―solid citizen‖ (Brooks and 
Marsh 2007: 181). Perhaps he was a little too solid. Viewers failed to warm to this new, more 
reputable Maverick, and the show was cancelled after one season. If these two failed Garner 
entries are any indication, viewers want their western heroes to be respectable, unlike Nichols, 
but not too respectable, like the new Bret Maverick.    
Arizona‘s first sitcom was an attempt to put old wine in new bottles. In the fall of 1971, 
five years after The Dick Van Dyke Show left the air, Rob and Laura Petry experienced 
something of a reunion on CBS‘s Saturday night line-up. The New Dick Van Dyke Show shared 
the 9:00 Eastern hour with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and followed a blueprint remarkably 
similar to Mary‘s in Minneapolis. Filmed on location in Carefree, Arizona, Van Dyke‘s character 
was Dick Preston, host of a local talk show on a Phoenix television station, and the action 
chronicled both station and home life. Despite its plum time slot, wedged among All in the 
Family, Funny Face, and Mary Tyler Moore (all top ten shows), Van Dyke‘s program garnered a 
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tepid reception, placing eighteenth. The show was moved to Sunday nights for its second season 
opposite NBC‘s popular rotating selection of Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan and Wife. Its 
ratings plummeted and so the setting of the show (and its production) limped west to Hollywood 
where it remained on the air for one more year. 
Arizona‘s second sitcom was far more successful. Based on the 1974 film Alice Doesn‟t 
Live Here Anymore, television‘s Alice debuted in 1976, and placed a respectable thirtieth in the 
Nielsen ratings. It rose to eighth place during its second season and continued to thrive for the 
next four years, peaking in the fourth position during the 1979-1980 season. The title character 
was Alice Hyatt, a widowed mother who left her native New Jersey to pursue a singing career in 
Hollywood. Fate intervened, however, when her Buick broke down in Phoenix. Alice and her 
twelve-year-old son, Tommy, got an apartment and took a temporary job at Mel‘s Diner. 
Although the show did occasionally tackle serious, contemporary issues such as sexuality and 
substance abuse, the people who populated the Phoenix of Alice were every bit as traditional and 
down-to-earth as the characters seen on any western. Alice‘s coworkers included Vera, a shy, 
naïve, and somewhat slow-witted waitress, and Flo, a salty and opinionated, but ultimately 
warmhearted Texan whose catchphrase was ―kiss my grits‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 31). The 
diner was owned by Mel Sharples who, despite a crotchety attitude, did a booming business 
largely because he made a spectacular pot of chili.  
The premise of Alice—a single woman reinventing her life in a new city—invites 
comparison to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and, consequently, comparison of Alice Hyatt‘s 
Phoenix to Mary Richards‘s Minneapolis. With its greasy-spoon atmosphere, Alice‘s Phoenix 
certainly is not as urbane as Mary Richards‘s Minneapolis. More important, whereas Mary went 
to Minneapolis by choice, making it the city of opportunity, Alice wound up in Phoenix by 
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accident, making it the city of inopportune circumstance. Nevertheless, Alice was not really a 
disparaging portrait of the local inhabitants. Mel‘s Diner was, in the glowing words of one critic, 
a place where ―love, comfort, down-to-earth wisdom, and good humor are always on the menu,‖ 
and Phoenix surely cannot be held in too-low regard if someone whose car breaks down there 
decides to stick around for nine years (West 2005: 73). The fresh start that Phoenix provided 
Alice was evident in the show‘s opening theme song, ―There‘s a New Girl in Town,‖ which was 
every bit as buoyantly optimistic as Mary Tyler Moore‘s ―Love is All Around,‖ containing the 
lines:    
There‘s a new girl in town ‗cause I'm feelin‘ good. Get a smile, get 
a song, for the neighborhood. There‘s a new girl in town on her 
own two feet, and this girl‘s here to say, ―with some luck and love, 
life‘s gonna be so sweet!‖ (Warner Home Video, 2006).  
 
Alice ended its nine-year run in 1985, one of the most durable sitcoms in television 
history. It was also Arizona‘s longest-running entry by a wide margin, and something of a 
geographic anomaly. In the two decades following the departure of Alice, just six Arizona-based 
programs found their way to television. This is a surprisingly low number given the state‘s 
proximity to the television production center of Los Angeles and the ease of recreating an 
Arizona setting in southern California. The lack of programming is even more surprising in light 
of the impressive population growth of the state, nearly 400% from 1960 to 2000. It seems 
unlikely that so many Americans would have moved to the state if they didn‘t find it at least a 
little bit interesting.  
Still, Arizona‘s post-Alice television landscape remained relatively sparse. Only two such 
programs made their debuts in the 1980s. Coming of Age was the story of a sixty-year-old 
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commercial pilot named Dick Hale, who had been forced into early retirement by his airline. He 
moved to a retirement community called the Dunes, and while his wife Ginny exuded an Alice 
Hyatt-like enthusiasm for her new home, grouchy Dick detested the place. He spent most of his 
time grousing about retirement, the Arizona climate, and his fellow residents. Although the show 
was given three different chances from March 1988 to July 1989, none of those runs lasted more 
than a month. Arizona‘s other 1980s comedy, Hey Dude, was a bright sitcom about the young 
staff of a dude ranch. Filmed in Tucson, the program premiered in 1989 on the youth-oriented 
Nickelodeon cable network. It lasted just two years, but that was good enough to make it the 
longest-running, Arizona-based program to appear between 1985 and 2005. That the state‘s only 
successful program for two decades was a safe throwback to the western genre suggests that 
television producers and audiences are perhaps not yet sure what to make of contemporary 
Arizona.  
The possibility also exists that Americans today do know what to make of Arizona, and 
that what they make of it is not very positive. On the first episode of the California-based sitcom 
Arrested Development, the main character, Michael Bluth, who was the only smart, responsible 
adult member of an otherwise slothful and dim-witted upper-class family, threatened to leave 
them and take a job in Phoenix. Upon his exit, he told his family, ―I‘ll see you when the first 
parent dies,‖ to which his mother, Lucille, responded, ―Well, I‘d rather be dead in California than 
alive in Arizona‖ (20th Century Fox: 2004).   
Given Arizona‘s recent television landscape, Lucille Bluth might not be alone in her 
convictions. The state has had its fair share of image problems. In 1986, Arizona Governor Evan 
Mecham chose to ignore the newly minted federal holiday memorializing Dr. Martin Luther 
King. In 1990, Arizona voters narrowly sustained that position in a referendum, precipitating an 
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intense backlash. Organizations refused to hold conventions in Phoenix, top entertainment acts 
vowed not to perform in the state, and the National Football League moved Super Bowl XXVII, 
scheduled to be played in Tempe, to Pasadena, California. ―For years Arizona has suffered from 
an image of being a center of right-wing extremism and fast-buck operators,‖ wrote Robert 
Reinhold of the New York Times. ―Once again Arizona has been plunged into political and racial 
turmoil, its leaders forced to protest that the state is not as narrow-minded and backward as it 
might seem to some outsiders‖ (Reinhold 1990: 1).   
Twenty years later, Arizona was back in an unwanted spotlight. When President Barack 
Obama spoke at the Phoenix Convention Center, he was greeted by a dozen armed protestors, 
including one who gave interviews to the press with an AR-15 assault rifle strapped to his back. 
It was a publicity stunt carried out by progun activists, intended to highlight the state‘s very 
permissive gun laws, but the brazen display stunned many across the nation. ―It is hard to know 
what is more shocking,‖ wrote the New York Times, ―the sight of a dozen Americans showing up 
to flaunt guns outside the venue for President Obama‘s speech in Phoenix on Monday, or the fact 
that the swaggering display was completely legal‖ (Wong 2009: 1). Arizona‘s image took 
another hit the following spring when the state legislature passed Senate Bill 1070, creating the 
most far-reaching immigration control measures in the country. Saturday Night Live said of 
Arizona, ―It‘s a dry fascism;‖ TV humorist Jon Stewart referred to the state as ―the meth lab of 
democracy;‖ and a parody of an Arizona tourism commercial by Chicago‘s Second City comedy 
troupe became an internet classic. The skit featured a Latino man gushing about the wonders of 
Arizona. That is, until he heard police sirens in the background, after which he fled the scene. 
The tag line of the video was ―Arizona. Come for the barren desert wasteland, stay for the 
hospitality‖ (Rose 2010: 1).  
619 
 
 Whether or not Arizona‘s image problems have had an impact on the state‘s television 
geography is anyone‘s guess, but it is notable that, following the state‘s referendum upholding 
the Martin Luther King Day boycott, no new Arizona-based programs debuted for more than a 
decade. And when Arizona did return in the 2000s, it did so with a string of programs that cast 
the state in a less-than-positive light. That was especially true of Manhattan, AZ, which aired for 
two months in the summer of 2000. It was the story of Daniel Henderson, a former Los Angeles 
vice cop who had left the force after his wife, a Greenpeace activist, died while attempting to 
rescue a dolphin from Japanese fishermen. The off-kilter tone of the show was set at her funeral 
when, in place of a casket, several cases of recalled tuna were lowered into a grave. Heartbroken, 
Daniel and his twelve-year-old son, Atticus Finch Henderson, relocated to Manhattan, Arizona, 
where Daniel took a job as sheriff.  
Manhattan was named for, and essentially owned by, Mayor Jake Manhattan, an aging 
former television star who seemed oblivious to the fact that nobody remembered him. Jake had 
conned Daniel into the move with promises of a luxury home, a world-class golf course, and 
Arizona‘s largest man-made lake. It turned out, however, that Manhattan was a hot, filthy, barren 
little town, where the sheriff‘s office and civic center were located in an old gas station. 
Buzzards circled overhead. There was no lake, no golf course, and Daniel‘s luxury home turned 
out to be a pile of lumber. Daniel made the best of it, though, parking a Winnebago next to the 
lumber pile and starting a new life among the town‘s bizarre residents. His neighbors, the 
Gundersons, were an aging couple who lived in a bomb shelter stocked with hand grenades and 
assault rifles. The Gundersons wiled away the empty hours having sex atop their Humvee near 
Area 61, a secret air force base where government scientists conducted shadowy experiments. 
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Daniel‘s first case involved finding out who was responsible for secretly removing the right rear 
legs of all the town‘s pets. By comparison, Mel‘s Diner seemed downright genteel.    
The wave of reality programs that hit television in the 2000s rippled through Arizona, 
and while these shows did cast Arizona in a much more urbane light, they did not do much for 
Arizona‘s self-image. One was the relatively benign, if somewhat materialistic, House Wars. It 
featured four families rushing to finish the interiors of newly constructed Phoenix houses, with 
the winners getting to keep the home. The show ran in the fall of 2003, and was essentially an 
eight-week commercial for Home Depot, the hardware chain that sponsored the programs and 
supplied the contestants‘ building materials. Another reality entry, the documentary series State 
V., aired for five weeks in 2002. If some Arizonans were concerned about Phoenix‘s violent 
reputation, they were evidently not members of the state‘s Supreme Court, which granted special 
permission for ABC‘s cameras to follow court cases in Maricopa County. Each of these involved 
murder, and episodes included preparations by prosecuting and defense attorneys, conferences 
with the accused, the trial itself, and even jury deliberations.  
If a painstaking examination of homicides did not paint an adequately unappealing 
portrait of contemporary Arizona, then Tuesday Night Book Club, a Scottsdale-based reality 
series that premiered in 2006, certainly picked up the slack. This show followed seven women 
who met weekly, even though none of them, according to Brooks and Marsh, ―seemed 
particularly interested in reading‖ (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 1,429). The women—all white, 
wealthy, and dissatisfied with their lives—were each assigned a title. There was the ―trophy 
wife,‖ the ―conflicted wife,‖ the ―doctor‘s wife,‖ the ―divorced mom,‖ the ―loyal wife,‖ the 
―newlywed,‖ and the ―party girl.‖ They discussed family problems, career aspirations, self-
esteem, money, cosmetic surgery, and most of all sex. The doctor‘s wife wished her husband was 
621 
 
more intimate, the trophy wife‘s husband wanted to engage in wife swapping, and the conflicted 
wife was having an affair. Critics were horrified, referring to the show as ―tawdry‖ and ―soft 
porn,‖ and, to their credit, viewers were uninterested (Brooks and Marsh 2007: 1,429). The show 
was cancelled after just two episodes.  
Arizonans unsettled by such unsavory portrayals of their state can take some solace in the 
fact that the state‘s two most successful entries of the 2000s were also the most sympathetic. 
Greeting from Tucson and Medium were neither totally positive portrayals, but both shows 
avoided the crude rustic stereotypes of Manhattan, AZ and the lusty nouveau-riche shallowness 
of Tuesday Night Book Club. Greetings from Tucson, which aired during the 2002-2003 season, 
is notable for being the only contemporary Arizona program to prominently feature Latino 
characters. Because the show appeared on the WB network, Greetings from Tucson did not 
attract a large number of viewers, but it was the first Arizona-based network sitcom since Alice 
to survive a full season. 
The protagonist was fifteen-year-old David Tiant, whose family had moved from an 
impoverished section of Tucson to an upscale neighborhood following his father‘s promotion at 
the copper mine where he worked. The show played on familiar sitcom contrasts. Dad Joaquin 
was Mexican-American and conservative, while mom Elizabeth was Irish-American and liberal. 
Joaquin was straight-laced, responsible, and middle class, while his brother, Ernesto, who lived 
with family, was a freewheeling dog catcher who had been divorced three times. David‘s 
cheerful sincerity contrasted with his sister Maria‘s self-absorbed petulance. Other characters 
included David‘s affectionate grandmother, Magdalena, and the pretty girl next door, Sarah.  
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Greetings from Tucson injected ethnic themes along with the standard chatter, including a few 
playful jabs at Mexican-American stereotypes. In one episode, for example, David quipped, 
―You know, of all the parts of my Mexican heritage that I‘m most proud of, taking the extended 
family to the mall in one car to buy one item is probably my favorite.‖ In another episode, the 
Tiants‘ neighbor saw Joaquin and Ernesto working in the yard and assumed they were day 
laborers. She was horrified upon realizing her mistake, and spent the rest of the day apologizing. 
Greeting from Tucson also featured more nuanced examinations of cultural tensions experienced 
by an upwardly mobile Latino family. Self-conscious Maria, for example, told her friends that 
she was not Mexican, but Spanish. When Joaquin agreed to buy David a new suit, David selected 
a shiny sharkskin model, while his father argued for something brown and conservative. For 
David, the brown suit represented assimilation, while, for Joaquin, the flashy one represented the 
worst stereotypes of working-class Mexican-Americans.      
 Greetings from Tucson was a pretty straightforward family sitcom, but for critic Tracy 
McLoone, its most extraordinary feature was how ordinary it was:  
Greetings from Tucson is standard family-based sitcom fare, with 
generally low-budget production values, an overactive laugh track, 
and passable humor. But if it‘s not going to win any awards for 
breaking generic sitcom molds, it does present non-whiteness as a 
fact of life, rather than a remarkable event. The only difference 
between this new series and, say, Growing Pains, is that the family 
is Mexican American . . . . It can‘t decide if it‘s comedy because of 
being Mexican American or in spite of Mexican American—and 
that‘s one thing working in its favor. We‘ve come a long way from 
laughing at Cuban Ricky Ricardo for being hyper-Hispanic. Now 
we have a comedy both for and about ethnicity, and about race 
without too much stereotyping . . . . David isn‘t identified as 
stereotypical Mexican American, or as stereotypical Anglo 
American . . . . David refuses categorization; he can‘t be neatly fit 
into one niche or the other, expanding what it means to be 
―Mexican American‖—or ―American‖ for that matter (McLoone 
2002: 1).  
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Medium, which premiered in 2005, has sent similarly mixed signals about life in 
contemporary Arizona. The title referred to Allison DuBois, who used her abilities as a 
clairvoyant to help solve murders and other crimes in Phoenix. While the focus of the show was 
on these crimes, the show was also, in part, a family drama, showing day-to-day life in the 
DuBois household. Allison was a calm, intelligent law student and loving mother of three. Joe, 
an aerospace engineer, was her ―calm, loving, and very supportive husband‖ (Brooks and Marsh 
2007: 879). Like the Tiants of Tucson, the DuBois family represented a mode of existence 
conspicuously absent in previous Arizona entries—a stable family living a middle-class lifestyle 
in a contemporary city. There were, however, the dreams.  
 As the show began, Allison wasn‘t aware of her psychic abilities, but she was having 
incredibly vivid dreams, all of which involved murder or some other horrific activity. Sometimes 
she dreamt of the victims, other times of the perpetrators, as in one incident where a killer was 
caressing her hands. ―Your skin is so white,‖ he said. ―If I took my blade and ran it from the 
bottom of your neck to the top of your crotch, the way the blood would slowly seep out and 
cover your white skin would be quite a sight‖ (Fuchs 2005a: 1). Understandably disturbed, 
Allison began to wonder if the events and people in her dreams might be real. When Joe began 
sending descriptions to law enforcement agencies, he found that this was indeed the case. And so 
the show rolled on, with Allison helping solve a string of crimes. Cases included a six-year-old 
boy‘s molestation and murder, a boy who claimed an alternate personality had made him kill his 
parents, a woman who committed suicide because her husband was abusing their infant daughter, 
and a serial killer who murdered six women and then slept with their dead bodies.   
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 Such gruesome events contrasted with Allison‘s generally happy family life, making it 
difficult to say whether Medium should be considered a positive or a negative portrayal of 
Phoenix. In either case, the series represented a step in the right direction, at least in terms of 
success. It was the first contemporary Arizona drama to debut since The Sheriff of Cochise in 
1956, ending a drought of nearly half a century. Medium continued to air through 2010, making 
it the longest-lasting Arizona program of any genre since Alice. The popularity of Medium may 
represent a willingness of television producers and viewers to reexamine their perceptions of the 
state, but whether or not life in Arizona is preferable to death in California remains to be seen.   
 
CONCLUSION 
The most thoroughly ―western‖ of the western states has been Wyoming. All of that 
state‘s entries have been conventional westerns—shows that were, in fact, about as conventional 
as a western could get. The moderately successful Laramie was set on a struggling frontier ranch 
plagued by outlaws, Indian raids, and corrupt land barons. The Virginian, one of television‘s 
most popular westerns, was the story of a gritty, brusque, enigmatic, and nameless gunfighter 
fighting to maintain law and order on another frontier ranch. Although several of Montana‘s 
programs have had contemporary settings, they‘ve been mostly rural, and, in general, have 
followed the familiar western themes of youthful vigor, optimism, and personal renewal played 
out on a wild, lawless, and uncivilized frontier. New Mexico was home to a number of 
conventional westerns, most notably The Rifleman, and that show‘s theme of a righteous man 
struggling to maintain law and order on a wild frontier continued in all of the state‘s other period 
pieces. New Mexico is unique for being the setting for a number of shows that provided 
relatively sympathetic portrayals of Native Americans, for hosting some of the first shows to 
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prominently feature Hispanic characters, and for serving as the backdrop of several programs—
Guestward Ho!, Empire, The Man and the City, and Nakia—that translated western themes into 
contemporary settings. The only New Mexico series not laden with traditional western themes 
was Roswell, a contemporary teen soap opera and thriller that played on the title city‘s reputation 
as a favorite destination of UFOs.       
While the television landscapes of several western states have been dominated by the 
western genre, a few have been almost devoid of it. Several Oregon entries, for example, have 
featured rugged protagonists in a beautiful but harsh wilderness, but none of these programs 
could be considered westerns. A pair of short-lived programs chronicled life on the grim streets 
of Portland, but the life of friendly, generally normal families has been the most common topic 
of the state‘s entries. With the exception of the family-oriented cable reality series Little People, 
Big World, the most common link among Oregon‘s television programs has been a short 
lifespan. Utah‘s television landscape has been similarly sparse, and, like Oregon, it has not been 
the setting of conventional westerns. Two short-lived Utah entries featured spectacular 
landscapes, but the most memorable state program was Orem‘s squeaky-clean family variety 
show, Donny & Marie, which placed Utah in a television no-man‘s land between the region‘s 
rugged small towns and its gritty and/or urbane cities. 
Washington‘s only period piece was the comedy/adventure series Here Come the Brides, 
but that program could hardly be considered a western. Like Brides, a number of Washington‘s 
programs have employed the familiar western theme of a newcomer rediscovering himself or 
herself in the West, but most of the traditional themes stop there. The majority of Washington‘s 
programs have been set in Seattle, and these frequently feature that city‘s transition from a 
working-class, blue-collar city to a stylish, white-collar metropolis. The clash between the 
626 
 
sophisticated and the earthy was the central theme of the city‘s most popular series, Frasier,  and 
if the city‘s most recent hit, the medical soap opera Grey‟s Anatomy, is any indication, the 
transition is near completion. Seattle‘s blue-collar past has faded from view, and it has become a 
city of handsome, successful, young, ethnically diverse, and hedonistic young professionals. 
Other common traits of Washington‘s recent programs, both those set in Seattle and in the state‘s 
small towns, have been melancholy moods, shadowy conspiracies, and often violent and 
supernatural themes. The plot devices of these programs have varied from werewolves to serial 
killers and from aliens to heroes with supernatural abilities, but all of them owe a stylistic debt to 
the groundbreaking mystery drama Twin Peaks, the story of a seemingly normal mountain town 
that turned out to be, in the words of Jon Lewis and Penny Stempel (1996), an ―eddying pool of 
sadism, Satanism, pornography and drugs.‖      
The television landscapes of Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada have had a foot in both the 
Old West and the New, each featuring both conventional westerns and contemporary programs, 
and both rural and urban landscapes. Arizona was home to a number of conventional westerns, 
the most successful being The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, which was the story of brave cavalry 
soldiers facing down outlaws and savage Native Americans on the rugged frontier. Arizona‘s 
subsequent westerns were fairly standard, with the usual stern and noble heroes, wild 
environments, violent action, corrupt land barons, tough towns, and characterizations of Native-
Americans that were sometimes pejorative, sometimes sympathetic. Beginning in the 1970s, 
Arizona began to feature programs with contemporary, urban settings, the most popular of which 
was the sitcom Alice, which depicted Phoenix as a friendly, earthy, if not especially upscale 
metropolis. Since the departure of Alice, the population of Arizona has boomed, but the growth 
of the state‘s television landscape has been modest by comparison. This may be in response to 
627 
 
some image problems that have plagued the state, and the state‘s recent entries have not been 
especially kind, mixing barren little towns with seedy urban areas, and including depictions of 
the state‘s urbanites as wealthy, materialistic, and dissatisfied.  
The Colorado television landscape has been relatively balanced between period pieces 
and contemporary settings, and between small towns and urban areas. Common traits linking 
many of Colorado‘s entries have been affection for the state‘s famously attractive vistas, and the 
message that these landscapes were wild, requiring a tough protagonist to tackle them. The most 
consistent device linking a number of the state‘s entries has been an examination of the role of 
the newcomer. On television, a good number of Coloradans have recently made their way to the 
state. Occasionally they were the villains, arriving to exploit the people and the land, but just as 
often the newcomer was the hero, arriving to do battle with the ignorance and prejudice of the 
natives. The ultimate newcomer was the title alien of Mork & Mindy, who arrived in Colorado in 
1978 to study the ways of human society. That show, however, tended to deal with universal 
issues, rather than regional themes, and the show‘s most prominent geographic legacy was to 
depict Boulder as an attractive, pleasant, modern city. Denver, in contrast, has been occasionally 
portrayed as a seedy place, but that city‘s most successful program went to the other extreme. 
The characters of Dynasty might not have been very admirable—they were the very model of 
1980s arrogance and avarice—but the city came off well, depicted as an extravagant playground 
for the wealthy and powerful. The state‘s longest-running entry, South Park, returned to the 
state‘s roots, with a small, quaint, mountain town playing host to eccentric and provincial locals 
and destructive outsiders. The show flayed just about every conceivable political, religious, 
philosophical and cultural perspective and, likewise, was both a condemnation and celebration of 
small-town life in the West. 
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Nevada has been the home to surprisingly few conventional westerns, but one of them, 
Bonanza, is rivaled only by Gunsmoke in terms of popularity and longevity in the genre. For 
many viewers, Nevada‘s television landscape is synonymous with the tales of wisdom, reason, 
honesty, and rugged independence on the prosperous Ponderosa Ranch. A few other Nevada 
programs were set in rural areas or small towns, but most of these had more in common with 
Twin Peaks than Bonanza, telling tales of eerie loneliness in the Nevada desert. The state‘s 
subsequent programs, however, were set mostly in urban areas. Reno was home to one show, but 
the vast majority of Nevada‘s television landscape has been dominated by Las Vegas. Many 
shows have focused on the city‘s famous gaming and entertainment industries, and the central 
geographic message of most Las Vegas entries, including the very popular crime drama, CSI, is 
that the city is a bubbling cauldron of money, glitz, glamor, and sleaze, where gruesome and 
even bizarre murders are par for the course.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
629 
 
CHAPTER 8 – CONCLUSION 
 
As noted in chapter one, I initially considered analyzing the television landscape by 
comparing the medium‘s images to existing works concerning regional identity. I ultimately 
decided that it would be best to approach television with a blank slate, to allow the possibility of 
identifying geographic themes not found in the existing regional literature. In hindsight, that 
decision proved to be, I believe, the correct one. That said, I think it is appropriate to conclude 
this study with a comparison of the geographic themes and images I have uncovered to those 
contained in other regional studies. Of course, an exhaustive review of the literature concerning 
regional identity in the United States would represent a dissertation unto itself, so I have selected 
a single work for each region. These five books come from different periods—the earliest from 
1972, and the latest from 2001—and represent diverse approaches to regional study, including 
the fields of journalism, American studies, sociology, geography, and history. Still, an 
examination of these books says much about the regional images and identities that television 
has reinforced, contradicted, and ignored.  
 
THE MID-ATLANTIC AND GARREAU‘S NINE NATIONS   
The states in this study were assigned to regions based loosely on those from Wilbur 
Zelinsky‘s 1980 article ―North America‘s Vernacular Regions,‖ in which he constructed regions 
based on the names of businesses in North American cities. From this base I modified the 
boundaries somewhat so as to fit the demands of my data set (as described in the first chapter), 
and that was certainly the case in the one defined here as the Mid-Atlantic. Zelinsky noted that 
630 
 
part of this region—the southern sections of Maryland and Delaware—were on the periphery of 
the South, and that western Pennsylvania had a similar relationship to the Midwest. Further, he 
identified parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey as being in the Northeast—a designation shared 
with some of New York and all six New England states. With all these ties to other places, 
Zelinsky actually could identify only one state—Pennsylvania, and a small section of it, at that—
with the term Mid-Atlantic. Still, this seemed to be the best available label for the general area 
and so is employed here. 
Because the Mid-Atlantic‘s regional identity is more nebulous than other regions in this 
study, I was unable to identify a single work that addressed this area alone. An evocative analysis 
of the region exists, however, within journalist Joel Garreau‘s 1981 book, The Nine Nations of 
North America. Garreau‘s designation for this region is the ―Foundry,‖ which he bluntly defined 
as the ―gritty cities of North America‘s industrial Northeast‖ (Garreau 1981: 50). In this usage, 
the Foundry is somewhat larger than my Mid-Atlantic, but the core is the same. Garreau 
excludes the District of Columbia, however, which, he says ―is so consumed with itself that it is 
dealt with separately‖ (Garreau 1981: 67).  
Garreau‘s description of the Foundry includes interesting parallels to the Mid-Atlantic‘s 
television landscape, including a statement that appeared to predict the iconic opening credits of 
The Sopranos. ―The view along the New Jersey Turnpike,‖ wrote Garreau, ―is so appalling that 
Dixie planners specifically mention that state as what they don‘t want to see their world become‖ 
(Garreau 1981: 66). While this assessment of the Jersey Turnpike was verified on television, it is 
notable that another of Garreau‘s descriptions of the Mid-Atlantic‘s landscape was not. ―The 
largest stretch of wilderness,‖ he wrote, ―in the East is in New Jersey—the Pine Barrens of the 
southern part of the state. The Delaware River, along its west, is the biggest wild river in the 
631 
 
East. The rural scenery twenty minutes north of Trenton is breathtaking (Garreau 1981: 65-66). 
The author acknowledges, however, that the wild and beautiful landscapes of the Mid-Atlantic 
are not central to the region‘s identity:    
The Foundry . . . is a place that is thoroughly described by man and 
what he‘s done to the mountains and rivers and plains in the course 
of trying to get ahead, more than it is by the mountains or rivers 
themselves . . . . Cities are the Foundry‘s dominant physical 
characteristic. There are lots of them. They‘re not terribly far apart, 
by the standards of most of the continent, and they are crowded 
places. As a result, there is no trouble pointing to the Foundry‘s 
heartland—its megalopolises (Garreau 1981: 66).   
 
The Mid-Atlantic‘s television programs have confirmed the centrality of cities to the 
region‘s identity. Urban and suburban settings are an important part of the entire country‘s 
television landscape, but the other regions analyzed in this study tend to showcase small towns 
and rural areas far more often. The Mid-Atlantic is, on television, a long string of large industrial 
cities separated only by their suburbs. With the exception of Joan of Arcadia, Maryland‘s 
television landscape is nearly synonymous with Baltimore and its suburbs. New Jersey‘s 
television landscape is also highly urbanized. Although the state lacks a dominant city, 
television‘s New Jersey is a long series of blighted industrial landscapes, apartment buildings, 
and pleasant suburban homes extending from New York to Philadelphia. The existence of the 
New Jersey wilderness described by Garreau would likely surprise those whose knowledge of 
the state has been informed only by the small screen. The television landscape of Pennsylvania 
has also been almost exclusively urban and suburban, with the three hundred miles that separate 
Philadelphia and Pittsburgh nearly invisible. The one major exception is Scranton of The Office, 
and that is a setting that could hardly be considered rustic. It is notable that Delaware—the one 
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Mid-Atlantic state that lacks a large metropolitan area—has been almost completely absent from 
television.     
Garreau argued that, along with urbanism, the defining trait of the region is economic 
struggle. In his opening essay, he quoted a business owner in a struggling Baltimore 
neighborhood who provided the secret of success in such an economic climate—―You just gotta 
be tough.‖ Garreau wrote:  
And tough is what defines North America‘s nation of northeastern 
gritty cities in a multitude of ways . . . . Pittsburgh. Bethlehem. 
Harrisburg. Wilkes-Barre. Wilmington. Camden. Trenton. Newark. 
The litany of names bring clear associations even to the most 
insulated of residents of other regions. These names mean one 
thing: heavy work with heavy machines. Hard work for those with 
jobs; hard times for those without. When columnists speak of 
managing decline, this is the region they mean. (Garreau 1981: 57-
58).  
 
And Garreau was not particularly optimistic about the region‘s prospects. ―The problem with the 
Foundry,‖ he wrote, ―is that it is failing. Its cities are old and creaking, as is much of its industry 
(Garreau 1981: 65). 
The Mid-Atlantic‘s television landscape both confirms and refutes Garreau‘s gloomy 
portrait of the region. Programs that depict the Mid-Atlantic as a troubled place are many. 
Whether set in Philadelphia (Strong Medicine, Philly, Ryan Caufield, Hack, and Cold Case), 
Pittsburgh (Equal Justice and Sirens), New Jersey (Toma, The Street, and Matt Waters) or 
Baltimore (In the Beginning, Roc, and Homicide), they all demonstrate that the region has more 
than its fair share of poverty and crime. That said, most of these programs focus on individuals—
doctors, lawyers, cops, a teacher, a priest, a social worker, and community activists—who have 
dedicated their lives to combating the ills that plague their city, rather than on those who are 
633 
 
actually suffering financial trouble. Programs that take a direct look at lives plagued by 
economic decay, such as Big House, Skag, and Dream Street, have been relatively rare and short-
lived. Even The Sopranos, which frequently depicted New Jersey as a garbage-strewn industrial 
wasteland plagued by crime and violence, featured a protagonist who drove a Cadillac and lived 
in a very nice house. More important, for every gritty comedy and drama set in the Mid-Atlantic, 
several more shows have featured characters who are relatively wealthy or, at the least, 
economically secure and who live in pleasant urban and suburban environments—shows 
including Amen, thirtysomething, Mr. Belvedere, Hope & Gloria, Max Bickford, One of the Boys, 
House, and One on One.             
Whether television or Joel Garreau has come closer to capturing the reality of the Mid-
Atlantic is, of course, a matter of speculation. There is no denying that a good many of the 
region‘s residents live above the poverty line—a fact largely ignored by Garreau. To be fair, 
1981 was not a particularly opportune time to write a glowing account of the Mid-Atlantic‘s 
economic fortunes, but it is possible that Garreau and other journalists have been somewhat 
obsessed with the region‘s pathology—focusing on its economic and social struggles rather than 
on the region‘s success stories. In contrast, audiences have been far more receptive to stories 
about the Mid-Atlantic‘s fortunate residents. For example, Skag, an unflinching and critically 
acclaimed look at the economic struggles of a Pittsburgh steel worker, lasted less than two 
months. Mr. Belvedere, a sunny story of a middle-class Pittsburgh family that could somehow 
afford a top-notch, live-in English butler, lasted five years.   
Garreau‘s assessment of Washington, D.C. chronicled the rapid growth of the city during 
the mid-twentieth century, and noted the explosive real estate prices and household incomes in 
the D.C. suburbs:   
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It‘s not the paychecks of the bureaucrats that caused Washington 
real estate prices to double in five years. While hardly what you‘d 
call niggardly, they don‘t pay for castles on Foxhall Road. It‘s the 
subsidiary private industries spawned by the existence of the 
bureaucrats . . . . The three biggest industries in the Washington 
area, after government and tourism, are the government 
codebreakers: lawyers, communicators, and consultants. 
Depending on how you define consultant, that industry may 
actually be bigger than the federal government that spawned it 
(Garreau 1981: 101).  
 
Washington journalists, one part of Garreau‘s trio of ―codebreakers,‖ have received a fair 
amount of attention on television, including Murphy Brown, one of D.C.‘s most successful 
programs. It is notable, however, that Washington‘s lawyers and consultants, most of whom, 
according to Garreau, work for private political action and lobby groups, are nearly absent from 
the city‘s television landscape. While lobbyists, activists, and their ilk have been part of the 
milieu of some political programs, just one show—the short-lived 1975 sitcom Karen—focused 
on this activist element of Washington politics. That is one show (and the title character of Karen 
was certainly not the sort of person that Garreau was describing when spoke of D.C.‘s wealthy 
and powerful codebreakers) compared to more than forty programs about government 
employees. If the ―codebreaker‖ industry is, as Garreau suggested, larger than the federal 
bureaucracy in D.C., then it is easy to argue that the city‘s television programs have created a 
misunderstanding of how Washington politics actually work.      
 
CONFORTI‘S IMAGINING NEW ENGLAND 
Joseph Conforti‘s 2001 book, Imagining New England, is an analysis of the region‘s 
identity as it evolved from the early seventeenth century to 1940. Those dates, of course, exclude 
the television era, but some interesting parallels can be found among the images and ideas 
635 
 
explored by Conforti and those found on New England‘s television landscape. Some of those 
parallels are minor, but amusing, such as a description of Maine from John Smith‘s 1616 
Description of New England, in which the New England patriarch described the future setting of 
so many tales of murder and terror as a ―country rather to affright than delight‖ (Conforti 2001: 
14). Conforti also quoted a 1793 caution from the usually boosterish New England geographer 
Jedidiah Morse to the effect that ―freedom, without virtue or honor, is licentiousness,‖ adding 
that a ―restless, litigious, complaining spirit‖ betokened ―a dark shade in the character of New 
Englandmen‖—an observation that seems to have predicted the emergence of the hedonistic, 
morally directionless attorneys of Ally McBeal, The Practice, and Boston Legal (Conforti 2001: 
93). Conforti also noted that, during the eighteenth century, Rhode Island was ―perceived in 
other corners of New England as a licentious republic where feeble or non-existent institutions 
allowed liberty to degenerate into unbridled individualism and disorder,‖ a comment that seems 
wholly appropriate to the behavior chronicled on Family Guy (Conforti 2001: 100).  
Conforti spent much time analyzing the Purtian legacy and the Pilgrim narrative of New 
England, and while these have rarely been dealt with on television, save for a short-lived parody 
of the Pilgrim experience in Thanks, some of the core elements of traditional New England 
culture can be found on the television landscape. One example is the ―Puritan commitment to 
literacy‖ that ―placed New England in the forefront of American education, newspaper 
publishing, and lyceum founding‖ (Conforti 2001: 4). He also cited Morse‘s American 
Geography, which stated that ―In New England, learning is more generally diffused among all 
ranks of people . . . than in any other part of the globe‖ (Conforti 2001: 97). While it may be a 
coincidence, the diffusion of learning observed by Morse in 1793 was evident on the region‘s 
television landscape two centuries later. Television‘s New England is home to a relatively large 
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number of writers and artists, including Maine‘s Jessica Fletcher and Vermont‘s Dick Louden, 
and to devotees of art, literature, and other prestigious forms of culture, such as the remarkably 
erudite private detectives from Boston. Many other New England television characters, from the 
sophisticated family dog and infant on Family Guy to the incredibly astute teenagers of James at 
15, Dawson‟s Creek, and Gilmore Girls, also reflect the region‘s intellectual tendencies.  
Another core New England trait identified by Conforti was a belief in social equality. 
Once again, Conforti quoted Morse, who observed that New England was a place where ―every 
man thinks himself at least as good as his neighbour, and believes all mankind are, or ought to be 
equal‖ (Conforti 2001: 97). At first glance, this notion seems at odds with a region where many 
shows, most notably Cheers, Gilmore Girls, and Family Guy, have revolved around a theme of 
class warfare. This theme is, indeed, quite common in television‘s New England, and far more 
common than in the Midwest, South, and West. There is a tendency among western programs, 
such as Dynasty and Bonanza, to glorify the wealthy, and a tendency in midwestern and southern 
programs, such as Roseanne, Married with Children, The Andy Griffith Show, and The Dukes of 
Hazzard, to adopt a fatalistic attitude toward the class system—that is, the notion that the rich are 
rich, the poor are poor, and that is that. It might be a bit of a stretch, but it is arguable that the 
topic of class differences comes up so often in New England television programs precisely 
because New Englanders find class disparity to be so objectionable. This tendency also suggests 
a third core New England trait identified by Conforti—the region‘s traditional sense of itself as 
the moral and political compass of the nation. This trait can be seen on some shows, such as The 
Young Lawyers and Boston Legal, but it is not a particularly strong characteristic of the region‘s 
television landscape. In fact, other than the occasional examinations of class, some of New 
637 
 
England‘s iconic shows, such as Cheers, Newhart, St. Elsewhere, and Ally McBeal, seemed 
deliberately apolitical.  
By analyzing popular and scholarly writings from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, 
Conforti also addressed the ways in which New England‘s sense of identity was tied to its sense 
of place. According to him, the writings of geographer Jedidiah Morse, author Harriet Beecher 
Stowe, and a Congregationalist pastor and Yale president Timothy Dwight ―signaled the rise of 
the most recognizable visual marker of New England regional identity: the central village, 
comprised of a cluster of houses and businesses encircling a white-steepled church‖ (Conforti 
2001: 124). Conforti noted that Stowe‘s New England novels ―dwelled on the ‗smallness, 
isolation, cohesiveness, innocence, and unchangingness‘ of village-centered New England,‖ and 
that Dwight‘s informal geographies tied such villages to the region‘s temperament (Conforti 
2001: 149). ―For Dwight, the New England character was etched into the regional landscape. 
Republican New England, ‗the numerous, cheerful, and beautiful towns and villages,‘ derived 
from the enterprise and diligence of an ‗extraordinary people‘‖ (Conforti 2001: 114). One does 
not need to dig very deep into New England‘s television landscape to confirm that ―numerous, 
cheerful, and beautiful towns and villages‖ have been central to the region‘s identity. Pleasant 
small-town life was a key theme of such iconic shows as Wings and Dawson‟s Creek, and quaint 
New England villages were absolutely central to Gilmore Girls, Newhart, and Murder, She 
Wrote. 
Conforti noted that, in the twentieth century, the leading artistic source of traditional New 
England images was poet Robert Frost. Frost‘s breakthrough book, published in 1914, was 
appropriately titled North of Boston. It should be noted that, while villages have been important 
to the television identity of southern New England, they have totally dominated television‘s 
638 
 
depiction of life in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. As noted in chapter three, just one of 
northern New England‘s television programs was set in a city—all the rest featured a small town 
or village. Conforti‘s study confirms that the tendency to depict the northern states as the more 
traditional part of the region—as the real New England, predated the television era:  
With the urban, industrial, and ethnic transformation of southern 
New England, the regional heartland seemed to shift northward. 
Old New England acquired an increasingly fixed geographical 
location; it endured in the Yankee towns and villages of Maine, 
New Hampshire, and Vermont. The regional periphery was 
reimagined as the new center of New England identity (Conforti 
2001: 263-264).   
 
As important as the New England village is to the region‘s identity, television programs 
about village life certainly do not tell the story of those living in Portland, Burlington, 
Manchester, Boston, Providence, or Bridgeport. Conforti acknowledged this issue, but also 
argued that the village‘s iconic status was actually a reaction to—or, more appropriately 
against—urbanization, immigration, and industrialization. The consecration of the New England 
village in the eighteenth century, wrote Conforti, ―reassuringly imaged the region as a pastoral, 
stable Yankee world precisely at a time when factories and mills were propelling New England 
to the forefront of the industrial revolution and when Irish immigrants were initiating changes 
that would, in less than two generations, bring about the ethnic transformation of the region‖ 
(Conforti 2001: 124). Idealized visions of the ―real‖ New England, such as those found in artist 
John Barber‘s engravings, continued to dominate regional identity in the works of other artists 
and writers long after the region had been transformed by industrialization. Conforti wrote:    
In the decades after he published Historical Collections of 
Connecticut and Massachusetts, Barber‘s New England became 
increasingly urban and ethnic, peopled by growing numbers of 
Irish immigrants. Yet visual representations of the ―real‖ New 
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England continued to invest the regional landscape with pastoral 
conventions similar to Barber‘s . . . . More than any other mid-
nineteenth-century writer, Harriet Beecher Stowe elevated the 
emergent compact New England village into a literary icon that 
paralleled the visual representation of the regional landscape that 
descended from Barber‘s engravings. Stowe limned the pastoral 
world of the New England village, slighting its incubating 
commercialism to create a region of the literary imagination that 
erased urbanism, industry, and the Irish from the changing 
landscape (Conforti 2001: 144).  
 
Conforti noted that the village remained at the center of regional identity well into the twentieth 
century, and for the same reasons. He wrote that ―nostalgia for Old New England registered 
Yankee reaction to disquieting alterations in the texture of life: the acceleration of ethnic, urban, 
industrial, and technological change‖ (Conforti 2001: 204). 
Conforti‘s analysis raises the question of whether or not the emerging regional traits to 
which village celebrants were reacting—ethnic diversity, urbanization, and industrialization—
have been evident on the television landscape as well. The answer is certainly yes, with many 
programs featuring numerous characters who were the descendants of the ―Catholic hordes‖ 
described by Conforti (Conforti 2001: 209). Ethnic flavor has been an important element of 
several programs, including Banacek, which was lauded for its positive portrayal of a successful 
Polish-American, and on a handful of other Boston programs that highlighted Irish-American 
culture, some of which were derided by critics for their tendency to stereotype. Cultural conflict 
between New England‘s old-guard WASP population and its working class Catholics also has 
been a recurring, although subtle, part of the region‘s television landscape. On Family Guy, Irish 
Catholic Peter Griffin was viewed as an unsuitable son-in-law by wife Lois‘s aristocratic WASP 
parents, the Pewterschmidts. On Who‟s the Boss, Italian-American Tony Micelli was a fish out 
of water in a WASPish, upper-class Connecticut suburb. A similar culture clash could be found 
640 
 
on the region‘s most important program. Ethnic differences were rarely dealt with in an overt 
way on Cheers, but it is notable that the line dividing the two camps in the Boston bar‘s war of 
words was, among other things, an ethnic one. In the cultural and intellectual middle ground 
were Cliff Clavin and Norm Peterson, both of whom had surnames that suggest British origin 
(although Cliff once claimed to be the rightful heir to the Russian throne). More important, with 
the exception of the Jewish psychiatrist Lilith Sternin, most of the intellectually, culturally, or 
economically elitist characters of the show were those with English, or seemingly English, 
surnames—Diane Chambers, Frasier Crane, Rebecca Howe, Kelly Gaines, Evan Drake, and 
Robin Colcord. Most of those from the blue-collar, earthy end of the bar had names that 
suggested New England‘s ―Catholic hordes‖—Ernie Pantusso, Carla Tortelli, and Sam Malone. 
The primary exception was Woody Boyd, but, of course, Woody was a midwesterner.   
As for the two other processes that precipitated New England‘s village nostalgia—
urbanization and industrialization—the former has been present on television, but the latter has 
not. Urbanization, without question, has been an important part of the region‘s television 
landscape. While many programs have taken place in small towns and villages, many more have 
been set in the region‘s cities and suburbs. For the most part, however, television‘s version of 
New England jumps from idealized village life straight to clean, appealing post-industrial cities 
and suburbs. Grim stories of industrialization and deindustrialization have largely been absent. 
Some shows have dealt with the detritus of urban decay, such as St. Elsewhere and Boston‘s 
occasional detective and legal shows, but the region has lacked conventional crime procedurals 
and successful working-class or inner-city dramas. When seediness—crime, poverty, ethnic 
strife—made a rare appearance, it was seen through the eyes of white-collar professionals, such 
as doctors, lawyers, and teachers, rather than from the perspective of the impoverished.  
641 
 
Conforti is a native of Fall River, Massachusetts, which he described as a ―gritty New 
England textile city, a charter member of the Rust Belt long before that term was coined.‖  
My New England, then, was a gray ethnic city of mills, hills, and 
dinner pails. From their classroom windows teachers could easily 
point to half-abandoned factories and warn indifferent students that 
they would end up in a ―sweatshop‖ . . . . Fabled Plymouth was 
only forty-five minutes away. Thanksgiving acquired a special 
aura because of Fall River‘s proximity to the place where the 
―Spirit of New England,‖ and of America, was born . . . . The real 
New England seemed at once geographically proximate and 
culturally remote (Conforti 2001: xi-xii). 
 
If television‘s version of New England is substantially lacking any key element of the region‘s 
geography, it is the ―gray ethnic‖ cities of ―mills, hills, and dinner pails.‖ Conforti‘s book 
confirms that television is not alone in its elimination of New England‘s industrial history. ―We 
need a new narrative,‖ he wrote, ―of how New England developed not only as a Puritan-Yankee 
city on a hill but also as an ethnic city by the mill‖ (Conforti 2001: 316). 
 
SHORTRIDGE‘S MIDDLE WEST  
In his 1989 book The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture, geographer James 
R. Shortridge examined the origin and evolution of the midwestern regional label. Shortridge 
acknowledged that images of the Midwest have been diverse and even contradictory, but cited L. 
Frank Baum‘s The Wizard of Oz as one of the popular works that best encapsulated the region‘s 
identity: 
Baum provides a useful point of departure . . . because his imagery, 
first written in 1900, is typical of much of the twentieth-century 
literature and raises some issues and dilemmas that are basic to 
Middle-western identity. Consider Dorothy, for example: polite, 
friendly, and bright-eyed, she wears her hair in braids, is a little 
642 
 
naïve, and lives on a farm. Her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry are 
simple, hardworking religious folk. They wear practical clothing, 
raise chickens and pigs, and are so trusting of authority that they 
give up Toto when a fussy schoolteacher claims it is the law. The 
farmstead also is stereotypical: it sits amidst a flat, nearly treeless 
plain; Kansas is vast and fertile but also bleak. This Middle-
western scene contrasts vividly with Oz, the land ―over the 
rainbow.‖ Oz is lush and wondrous in all ways, a point made 
graphically in the 1939 Judy Garland version of the tale by a 
switch from black-and-white to color photography. Still, for all its 
fascination, Oz is as full of danger and deceit as it is opportunity 
and Dorothy eventually opts to return home (Shortridge 1989: 1-2).  
 
Shortridge‘s selection of The Wizard of Oz as an iconic Midwestern story is connected to 
the fact that Dorothy‘s story begins and ends on a farm. ―Farming is the dominant image in 
Baum‘s Middle West,‖ wrote Shortridge, ―as it has been in the accounts of journalists throughout 
this century‖ (Shortridge 1989: 2). Such images are central to Shortridge‘s argument ―for a close 
and continuing association between the Middle-western identity and the concept of pastoralism‖ 
(Shortridge 1989: 2). There has certainly been no shortage of pastoral images associated with the 
television Midwest. As noted in chapters four and five, relatively few midwestern programs have 
had a truly agrarian focus, but a number of the region‘s programs, such as Little House on the 
Prairie and Smallville, and a large number of midwestern characters, most notably Radar 
O‘Reilly and Woody Boyd, have been tied to the farm.  
Shortridge acknowledged that the centrality of pastoralism to midwestern identity 
contradicted the ―predominantly urban reality of the modern Middle West.‖ That urban reality is 
especially true on television. Most of the region‘s television images came along after 1970—
about a half-century after the region‘s farm population peaked. For all the television stories of 
the region‘s farmers, there have been many more about urban and suburban midwesterners. That 
said, even though pastoral images have been outnumbered by urban ones on midwestern 
643 
 
television programs, the values associated with pastoralism have been integral to the region‘s 
television identity. Some of the terms that Shortridge used to describe Dorothy and her family—
polite, friendly, bright-eyed, naïve, simple, hardworking, religious, practical and trusting—could 
be used to describe many of television‘s midwesterners, even those living in urban environments. 
These traits are not exclusive to the region and are not appropriate for all characters on the 
Midwest‘s television landscape, but they are far more apparent in the Midwest than any other 
television region, and some of the region‘s iconic television characters—Radar O‘Reilly, Richie 
Cunningham, Woody Boyd, Tim Taylor, Laverne De Fazio, Shirley Feeney, Mary Hartman, and 
Jed Clampett—possess nearly all of these characteristics. Perhaps the closest television parallel 
to the Wizard of Oz was The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Mary Richards did not grow up on a farm, 
but she was from the small town of Roseburg, Minnesota, and she possessed all the key pastoral 
traits—she was polite, optimistic, a little naïve, hardworking, religious, practical, and trusting. 
While Mary was very intelligent and not quite as innocent as Dorothy, her look of wide-eyed 
amazement, seen each week in the opening credits as she twirled in the busy streets of 
Minneapolis, was not much different from Dorothy‘s initial reaction to Oz (and, it can be added, 
Mary‘s interaction with Lou, Murray, and Ted brought to mind Dorothy‘s friendships with the 
lion, tin man, and scarecrow). Of course, not every midwestern television character would be 
mistaken for Dorothy Gale, but the values that Shortridge associated with pastoralism can be 
found in many of them—in Dave Garroway‘s sincerity, Ann Romano‘s industriousness, Drew 
Carey‘s egalitarianism, Bob Hartley‘s humility, Alex P. Keaton‘s self-reliance, Roseanne 
Conner‘s pragmatism, and Arthur Fonzarelli‘s honesty.          
Shortridge also argued that the Midwest‘s identity had strong temporal and spatial 
elements. In both time and space, the Midwest was lodged between the established East and the 
644 
 
untamed West, and the region‘s identity began to assume this middle ground, forming an ―ideal 
middle kingdom‖ between the ―uncivilized wilderness‖ of the West and the ―urban-industrial 
evils‖ of the East (Shortridge 1989: 6). Shortridge likened this level of maturity to stages in the 
human life cycle, writing that ―whereas the West was seen as brash and youthful, and the East 
was viewed as stodgy and old, the Middle West escaped the problems of both extremes. It was 
still young enough to have ideals and energy, yet it was not so old as to be ossified by decay, 
class stratification, and overcrowding‖ (Shortridge 1989: 8).   
This maturity model can certainly be seen on the television landscape. The frontier 
wildness of the West could be seen on a few programs, but mostly on ―midwestern westerns‖ 
like Gunsmoke and Little House on the Prairie, and even those shows were not nearly as ―brash 
and youthful‖ as many similar programs set in the West. The television Midwest has also had its 
fair share of urban decay, particularly in Chicago, but when compared to New Jersey or to 
Baltimore, Washington, New York, and Philadelphia, the cities of the Midwest have escaped 
relatively unscathed. It is perhaps appropriate that Minneapolis has been characterized as being 
nearly crime free, but the relative lack of poverty, decay, and crime on the television landscapes 
of Kansas City, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and, particularly, Detroit and Cleveland, seems at odds 
with reality. But it is not at odds with the midwestern identity described by Shortridge. It is 
possible that these cities have been free of crime and poverty on television because they are in 
the Midwest, and they are supposed to be free of crime and poverty. In other words, television‘s 
version of many of the Midwest‘s cities, particularly its eastern ones, conforms to regional values 
far more easily than the real cities do.  
Television‘s version of Chicago has an odd relationship with midwestern identity. In 
some ways, it squares nicely with the pastoral values described above. This is particularly true of 
645 
 
its family sitcoms, nearly all of which possessed an air of friendliness, industriousness, 
cheerfulness, sincerity, and optimism. On the other hand, the snide attitude of programs such as 
Married with Children undercut these values, while the bloodbath on Chicago‘s television streets 
and the attendant images of urban decay place the city far away from the ―ideal middle kingdom‖ 
that the Midwest is supposed to represent. If nothing else, the sheer size of the city, which is 
quite evident on television, place it more comfortably in the East than in the Midwest.  
Still, television‘s Chicago fits, if a little oddly, into Shortridge‘s maturity model of the 
Midwest. Rather than being midwestern because it eliminates the wildness of the West and the 
ossification of the East, television‘s Chicago is midwestern because it embraces both wildness 
and ossification. Like eastern cities, Chicago is the home of great wealth and great poverty, and 
its television landscape contains the ―urban-industrial evils‖ of the hardened East. That said, 
Chicago‘s television programs suggest that it still, for better or worse, has some youthfulness 
left. A sense of wildness has been far more evident on Chicago‘s television landscape than on 
those of eastern cities—it closely resembles the stormy, husky, brawling city described by Carl 
Sandburg. Viewers of early Chicago television might have discovered the Chicago Symphony 
Orchestra, but they were just as likely to have witnessed stock car races, meat-carving 
demonstrations, or a live cattle drive. This wild streak can best be seen on the city‘s crime and 
medical dramas. Chicago‘s shoot-first cops, such as Eliot Ness, Frank Ballinger, Katy Mahoney, 
and Mike Torello, have more in common with television‘s rugged, taciturn western sheriffs than 
with the philosophical cops and private eyes of eastern crime shows like Law & Order, Spenser: 
for Hire, and Homicide. The medical drama ER, despite its frequent depiction of the calamitous 
results of urban decay, also reflected the youthful vigor of the city. When compared to the 
doctors of Boston‘s St. Elsewhere, the staff of ER was less fatalistic, less resigned to the despair 
646 
 
of the urban environment. Perhaps the strongest indication of Chicago‘s youthfulness can be 
found in its lack of legal dramas. It is on such shows that characters can be philosophical about 
crime and, by extension, the social issues that cause crime. If a tendency to be philosophical is a 
sign of old age, then television‘s Chicago has yet to reach that stage. Chicago‘s television 
characters are far more likely to kill the criminal than to ponder the crime.     
Of all the midwestern character traits identified by Shortridge, the one that cuts to the 
core of the region‘s television identity is the idea that midwestern life acts ―as a deterrent to 
ostentation and arrogance‖ (Shortridge 1989: 30). Whether a wide-eyed innocent like Radar 
O‘Reilly, or a bitter realist like Roseanne Conner, nearly every important midwestern television 
character and personality has represented a rejection of pretension and self-importance—Drew 
Carey, Bob Hartley, Woody Boyd, Al Bundy, Grace Kelly, Sherman Potter, Jed Clampett, Red 
Foley, Dave Garroway, and Studs Terkel are among the many examples of this. It would be 
difficult to imagine a number of programs from other regions, particularly those that featured 
status-conscious, self-absorbed yuppies, being set in the Midwest. In reality, the traits and values 
of characters from Grey‟s Anatomy, Ally McBeal, Sex and the City, and thirtysomething might 
well be found among the populations of Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, 
or Kansas City, but that has not been the case on television. Although it is true that numerous 
attempts have been made to place self-absorbed yuppies in Chicago, viewers have apparently 
found them to be an invasive species, and have killed them off quickly. As noted in chapter four, 
only one of Chicago‘s many yuppie sitcoms lasted long, and that was the beer, sports, and poker-
filled universe of My Boys, a show whose tomboy protagonist was conceived as a midwestern 
response to Sex and the City. It is perhaps because of the Midwest‘s egalitarian streak that, in the 
words of Shortridge, the region came ―to symbolize the nation and to be seen as the most 
647 
 
American part of America‖ (Shortridge 1989: 33). This idea is also at the heart of the Midwest‘s 
television landscape—the region has often been characterized as a sort of microcosm of 
America—and can be seen most plainly on a number of Ohio programs, such as Family Ties, 3rd 
Rock from the Sun, Ed, and Normal, Ohio.  
Television‘s assessment of midwestern character, however, has not been entirely positive. 
Shortridge wrote that the peak of Midwestern self-confidence occurred in the 1910s. This self-
confidence began to be replaced by self-doubt in the 1920s, and a number of the region‘s 
television programs and characters reflect that loss of confidence. Some observers, according to 
Shortridge, began to argue that ―conservatism had begun to replace progressive idealism, a sign 
perhaps that the yeoman society was aging. Old-fashioned, even culturally backward, ideas were 
often seen to exist along with the traditional pastoral friendliness and honesty‖ (Shortridge 1989: 
9). A prime example of this could be found on the Korean War comedy M*A*S*H. Nearly all of 
the region‘s midwestern characters—Iowa‘s Radar O‘Reilly, Illinois‘s Henry Blake, and 
Missouri‘s Sherman Potter—exhibited the traditional pastoral traits of friendliness and honesty, 
but they were also, to a degree, old-fashioned and culturally backward. O‘Reilly was kind and 
trustworthy, but also somewhat unenlightened. Potter was friendly and earnest, but also 
obstinately old-fashioned and stodgy. Blake was a likable goofball and a competent surgeon but, 
like all of the 4077th‘s midwesterners, he did not possess the wit and sophistication of Maine‘s 
Hawkeye Pierce, California‘s B.J. Honeycutt, or Boston‘s Trapper John MacIntyre and Charles 
Emerson Winchester. The primary example of negative midwestern stereotypes, however, was 
Frank Burns, M*A*S*H‘s incompetent, self-righteous, sycophantic, hypocritical, conservative, 
and avaricious Indiana native. Burns, perhaps more than any other television character, 
exemplified what Shortridge described as the ―air of smug self-righteousness‖ that began to 
648 
 
characterize the Midwest in the 1920s. During that period, the Midwest came to be viewed as a 
region of ―business-minded, narrowly conservative people.‖ Shortridge described the 
conventions of the period:  
A siege mentality, similar to that found throughout the South, 
developed there, whereby people blindly protected the old 
traditions against corrupting influences that were perceived to be 
coming in from outside . . . . Being conventional gradually 
changed into being reactionary. Movements by the Non-Partisan 
League to create state-owned grain elevators, banks, and other 
socialistic reforms were regularly opposed by the mainstream 
society with little or no debate. Church attendance became a 
requisite for social acceptance instead of an individual option, and 
similar allegiance was required for Prohibition and other moral 
issues of the time (Shortridge 1989: 52-53).  
 
This was clearly the kind of society that had produced Frank Burns, and a residue of its 
conventions could be found in other midwestern television characters and programs. Alex P. 
Keaton represented a far more friendly and benign embodiment of these reactionary values than 
did Frank Burns, but he was no less conservative. The Midwest‘s parochial and provincial 
attitudes were effectively skewered on Mary Hartman and Fernwood 2-Night, and, somewhat 
less effectively, on Normal, Ohio, Harper Valley PTA, and Married to the Kellys. And although 
Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley represented a positive spin on life in the Midwest, 
conservative values were essentially inherent in both shows. They could even be found, to a 
degree, in the Presbyterian militancy of Mary Richards.     
Despite such images, it is important to note that Archie Bunker, for example, lived in 
New York, not the Midwest. For the most part, television has been relatively kind to the 
Midwest, with objectionably reactionary characters kept to a minimum. This is likely because the 
Midwest‘s fall from grace occurred around 1920 and, of course, television did not come to the 
649 
 
Midwest until much later, when the region‘s image was experiencing a rebound. Shortidge noted 
that the Midwest‘s esteem and self-confidence bottomed out in the years prior to 1950, but that 
they began to recover in the second half of the twentieth century. This renewed faith in 
midwestern values was connected with nostalgia, which itself, according to Shortridge, arose 
―slowly and uncertainly during the 1950s‖ as a ―vague sense of loss seems to have developed 
among city dwellers.‖ 
Instead of generating wholesale condemnation by writers, small 
towns and traditional farms, indeed the entire Middle-western 
culture, began to be labeled as quaint. Support for this viewpoint 
quickened in the mid 1960s, and by the early 1970s it was perhaps 
the dominant image that outsiders held of the region. From this 
perspective, the Middle West had become a museum of sorts. No 
up-and-coming citizen wanted to live there, but it had importance 
as a repository for traditional values. The Middle West was a nice 
place to visit occasionally and to reflect upon one‘s heritage. It was 
America‘s collective ―hometown,‖ a place with good air, 
picturesque farm buildings, and unpretentious ―simple‖ people 
(Shortridge 1989: 67-68). 
   
To a great degree, the Midwest‘s television identity resides in the notion that the region is 
―America‘s collective hometown.‖ The region‘s television landscape is filled with small towns, 
and that landscape is often populated by people who, for the most part, possessed the admirable 
traits long associated with the region‘s pastoral character.  
What is unusual about the Midwest‘s television landscape, as noted above, is that that 
these pastoral values are also usually attributable to the Midwest‘s population in large 
metropolitan areas. This is the most significant departure of the television Midwest from the 
region described by Shortridge. The result is that the television map of the Midwest sometimes 
corresponds, and sometimes differs, from Shortridge‘s analysis of the cognitive map of the 
region:  
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Despite the results of perceptual surveys that show a Kansas-
Nebraska focus for today‘s Middle West, the defining cultural 
traits actually describe Iowa better. Small towns dominate in both 
places, but the extent of rural prosperity differs considerably. A 
demanding yet rewarding physical environment is quintessentially 
Middle Western, but in the western plains, demand often exceeds 
reward . . . . Missouri is a great mixing ground, a place that was 
initially Southern in culture but that is not totally at ease with any 
regional label today . . . .  The pastoral definition of the Middle 
West has long created identity problems for people in the Great 
Lakes states. In Michigan, the most extreme case, the label Middle 
West is almost never used as a descriptor . . . . Wisconsin and 
Minnesota share Michigan‘s heritage of lumbering, mining, and 
tourism; and Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois mirror its heavy 
industrial side. Well-developed agricultural images, however, 
make all of these other states fit the pastoral Middle West better 
than does Michigan. Wisconsin owes much of its Middle-western 
identification to its self-proclaimed status as ―America‘s 
Dairyland.‖ Minnesota, with its combination of rich agriculture 
and large cities that have escaped urban decay, is the epitome of 
the old Middle-western utopian dream of the 1910s before the 
industrial portion of the cultural definition was excised (Shortridge 
1989: 10-11). 
  
Most Iowa-based shows conform to midwestern themes, but they have largely been 
unsuccessful. Still, given that pastoral character traits are so strongly associated with two of 
Iowa‘s favorite television sons, James T. Kirk and Radar O‘Reilly, it is arguable that the 
television version of the state is, as Shortridge suggested, the epitome of the Midwest. As for the 
other trans-Mississippi states, the Dakotas appear to be more western than midwestern but, like 
Nebraska, these states‘ programs have not been very successful, so it is unlikely that viewers‘ 
geographic perceptions have been affected one way or the other. Television‘s version of Kansas 
has an interesting relationship with its midwestern identity. In many ways it is quintessentially 
midwestern, given its lack of urban areas, its preponderance of friendly, earthy people, and the 
fact that several shows have taken place in small towns and on farms. But television‘s Kansas 
has also been the sort of place where, as Shortridge put it, ―demand often exceeds reward,‖ as 
651 
 
evidenced on the tumultuousness of Jericho and Courage the Cowardly Dog and in the 
geography-induced malaise of Tom and The Phil Silvers Show. Missouri‘s schizophrenic 
television history, with its mixture of seedy urban areas, downhome rural backwaters, and 
wholesome and not-so-wholesome small towns reflects Shortridge‘s assertion that the state 
resists any concrete regional label. The pleasantness of Mary Tyler Moore, Little House on the 
Prairie, and Coach certainly confirms the description of Minnesota as the ―epitome of the old 
Middle-western utopian dream.‖  
Among the Great Lakes states, as Shortridge suggested, Wisconsin has the least trouble 
with its midwestern identity—the state‘s television programs radiate all of the love and 
wholesomeness one might expect from ―America‘s Dairyland.‖ The other Great Lakes states 
contain some of the more interesting identity issues in the Midwest. Illinois is home to gritty 
streets of Chicago, but has also played host to shows that adhere to pastoral character traits—
from the squareness of Bob Newhart, to the unabashed wholesomeness of According to Jim, to 
the earthy genuineness of Roseanne. Indiana‘s television landscape has been surprisingly urban 
and often violent, but it is hard to ignore the industriousness of Ann Romano, and impossible to 
overlook the television legacy of Woody Boyd, who is arguably television‘s most typical (or 
stereotypical) midwestern character.  
As Shortridge noted, it is somewhat difficult to label Michigan as midwestern. The state‘s 
television landscape, with its lack of small towns and emphasis on shows that feature African-
Americans or blue-collar gearheads, does indeed suggest an identity shaped by lumberjacks, 
miners, and factory workers rather than one forged on the farm. Still, Home Improvement was, 
without doubt, the state‘s defining program, and it was a thoroughly midwestern show. As noted 
earlier, the show‘s protagonist, Tim Taylor was an embodiment of the region‘s pastoral values—
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described by one critic being emblematic of ―the white-bread heartland‖ (Stark 1997: 383). In a 
1996 Midwest Today article about series star Tim Allen, journalist Larry Jordan wrote that ―with 
his white-bread commonality and a face as wide open as the Great Plains, Allen seems just like 
your average Joe‖ (Jordan 1996: 1).   
Shortridge also noted the problems of assigning a midwestern label to Ohio. The state‘s 
television landscape, however, contradicts this. In fact, Ohio‘s television programs could serve as 
a microcosm for the evolving images of the Midwest described in Shortridge‘s book. The fact 
that Ohio‘s television programs have favored small towns over the state‘s cities reflects the 
region‘s pastoral roots, as did the images of Cincinnati‘s Midwestern Hayride and Charley 
Weaver‘s Mount Idy. The mediocrity of 3rd Rock from the Sun‘s Rutherford, the narrow-minded 
conservatism of Harper Valley, and the downright cultural backwardness of Mary Hartman and 
Fernwood 2-Night‘s fictional small town reflected the region‘s self-doubt and loss of confidence. 
And there is no doubt that Family Ties and Ed reflected the search for the integrity of family and 
community that became associated with the Midwest during the subsequent nostalgia movement. 
Even Cleveland, a city whose image is clearly at odds with a midwestern label, became 
midwestern on television. Drew Carey, the star of that city‘s defining program, wrote in his 2000 
autobiography: 
The only thing that ever really got to me back when The Drew 
Carey Show premiered was when they would compare my show to 
Friends . . . . Now, normally a guy wouldn‘t bitch about having his 
show compared to a super-popular mega-hit, except that they were 
comparing us to the wrong show. We thought our show was closer 
in tone to [Illinois‘s] Roseanne or [Missouri‘s] Grace Under Fire   
. . . . It‘s set in the Midwest. Gilligan‟s Island was more like 
Friends than we were (Carey 2000: 69).  
 
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REED‘S ENDURING SOUTH 
Sociologist John Shelton Reed‘s 1972 book The Enduring South was, like the works of 
Conforti and Shortridge, an attempt to identify key traits related to a region‘s identity, but it 
differed from those two in that it relied primarily on public opinion surveys and a variety of 
statistical data. Among other things, Reed determined that northerners‘ (a term used to describe 
any American not from the South) ―attitude toward Southerners may be slightly less favorable 
than Southerners‘ attitudes toward them. Extremely negative responses, however, may be more 
frequent among Southerners‖ (Reed 1972: 21). Reed‘s use of the phrase ―may be‖ indicated his 
reluctance to make a definitive statement about this matter, and the region‘s television shows are 
even vaguer on the subject. The occasional snobbery of outsiders found on such programs as The 
Simple Life, The Andy Griffith Show, and Hawkins was perhaps an indication that northerners 
held the South in low regard, but that appeared to be as much an urban prejudice as a northern 
one. The same can be said for shows like Carter Country, Lobo, and In the Heat of the Night, 
where the tension was between big city and backwoods, rather than between North and South. 
An extremely negative attitude toward northerners among southerners is even less apparent and, 
in fact, the tendency among television‘s southerners—as evidenced on Andy Griffith and The 
Simple Life—is to approach outsiders with a sense of bemusement rather than hostility. 
Reed also examined some commonly held beliefs about southern culture, among them the 
notion that southerners have a greater tendency toward violence than other Americans:   
―Southerners,‖ someone once remarked, ―will be polite until 
they‘re angry enough to kill you.‖ He might have added that this 
flashpoint seems to be lower for Southerners than for other 
Americans. Beneath the image of a gracious, hospitable, leisurely 
folk has lurked that of a hot-tempered, violent, even sadistic 
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people, an image ―so pervasive that it compels the attention of 
anyone interested in understanding the South‖ (Reed 1972: 45).   
 
Reed verified that the South suffered from more violence than other sections of the 
country, but the region‘s television programs do not reflect this. Given television‘s preoccupation 
with violence, it is arguable that every region of the country‘s television landscape is a violent 
one. A few iconic southern shows did contain violence, or the aftermath of it, including In the 
Heat of the Night and I‟ll Fly Away, but the television landscape of the South, when compared to 
that of the West or to several cities of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, seems quite placid. Serious 
violence was practically unheard of on The Andy Griffith Show, where the sheriff did not carry a 
gun and the deputy had only one bullet, and the same was true of The Dukes of Hazzard, where 
the protagonists carried only bows and arrows, which they never fired at another person. New 
Orleans has long been a violent television city, but it is also rarely considered to be a typical 
southern city. If anything, violence is most strongly associated with those southern shows that 
are more urban and less provincial, like Profiler, Line of Fire, and even American Dad. In other 
words, the less ―southern‖ the region‘s shows are, the more violent they become. 
Reed confirmed another commonly held belief about the South—that religion was more 
pervasive there than any other part of the country—but this trait is also not common on the 
region‘s television landscape. There is, of course, no evidence on television to suggest that 
southerners are likely to be irreligious, and the region‘s programs did contain some religious 
elements. On Andy Griffith, for example, Andy and Barney attended church regularly, and even 
sang in the choir. The Nashville Network had an entire program dedicated to southern gospel 
music, and the title of I‟ll Fly Away certainly had a religious connotation. Fewer shows in the 
South also have tested the bounds of American social taboos—it is difficult to imagine, for 
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example, Will & Grace having been set in Jackson, Mississippi. That said, when compared to 
programming from the rest of the country—for example, California‘s 7th Heaven, Connecticut‘s 
Book of Daniel, Illinois‘s Have Faith, Pennsylvania‘s Amen, Maryland‘s In the Beginning and 
Joan of Arcadia, and Massachusetts‘s Miracles—there has been a relative lack of overtly 
religious programs set in the South.   
Of all the traits attributed to the region, Shelton noted that the ―paramount characteristic 
of Southerners, in the view of twentieth-century Americans, seems to be their relative (if only 
relative) lack of ambition, energy, and industry‖ (Reed 1972: 30). With few exceptions, such as 
the hillbillies lazing about on Hee Haw‘s porches and haystacks, very few southern television 
characters could be described as being absolutely shiftless. It is true, however, that television‘s 
southerners do seem to be lacking in ambition and industry, at least when compared to characters 
in other regions. Few of the region‘s television personalities have been terribly wealthy, and 
relatively few could be described as upwardly mobile. As often as not, though, such traits were 
given an air of nobility. The southerners seen on The Waltons, B. J. and the Bear, The Dukes of 
Hazzard, and The Andy Griffith Show were rarely depicted as being lazy, but rather as people 
who had embraced the gift of simplicity. As for the South‘s perceived lack of energy, some of 
the region‘s iconic shows did indeed have a sleepy pace, such as In the Heat of the Night, Andy 
Griffith, and Evening Shade. In a few, such as Any Day Now, I‟ll Fly Away, and Frank‟s Place, 
the pace was positively languid.  
Included in Reed‘s study was a discussion of whether or not southern identity was fading. 
He began by acknowledging that the South was undergoing profound changes:   
The South, runs the refrain, is disappearing: the region is well on 
its way to becoming ―almost indistinguishable from any other 
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region in the country‖ . . . . Certainly there have been phenomenal 
changes in the lives of most Southerners during the decades just 
past. In economic and demographic terms, the South has 
undergone a considerable demographic transformation . . . . 
Although pockets of poverty and ignorance remain, the 
industrialization for which generations of ―New South‖ thinkers 
worked has largely taken hold, with dramatic effects on regional 
differences in education, income, and style of life. For changes of 
such magnitude in the material conditions of life in the South not 
to affect the attitudes and values which have distinguished 
Southerners in the past would be virtually inconceivable . . . . Add 
to the impact of industrialization and urbanization the effects of 
mass society and mass communications—the whole logic of 
which, it seems, must be to reduce sectional differences—and there 
appears to be little reason to suppose that the South . . . will not be 
exorcised shortly (Reed 1972: 2).  
 
Some evidence exists that regional identity is fading on the South‘s television landscape. 
There is, of course, no way of saying definitively which programs are ―more southern‖ than 
others, but it is possible to get a sense of this by asking whether or not a particular program could 
have been set elsewhere. It would be difficult to imagine, for example, North Carolina‘s first 
program, The Andy Griffith Show, taking place outside of the South. It is less difficult, however, 
to imagine one of the state‘s more recent programs, Charlotte‘s My Brother and Me, taking place 
in a different city. Likewise, Georgia‘s 1970s entries, The Dukes of Hazzard, Lobo, B. J. and the 
Bear, and Carter Country, were inexorably tied to their southern setting. A pair of Georgia‘s 
1980s entries, Designing Women and Matlock, were less cartoonish in their depiction of the 
South, but their regional identity was no less integral. However, Georgia‘s most popular 1990s 
program, Proflier, probably could have been set in any major city.  
Reed also examined suggestions that the reduction in regional uniqueness was occurring 
primarily in southern cities, while the rural South remained relatively unchanged. ―There has 
been some speculation,‖ wrote Reed, ―that city people are pretty much alike, and the bulk of 
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regional differences will be found among rural populations‖ (Reed 1972: 5). This is, to a degree, 
true of the television South. The least ―southern‖ shows tend to be set in urban or suburban areas 
(Profiler, Line of Fire, American Dad), and the more southern ones in small towns or rural areas 
(Andy Griffith, The Dukes of Hazzard, The Waltons). That said, One Tree Hill contained few 
conventional southern stereotypes despite being set in a small town.     
As the title of his book suggests, Reed uncovered plenty of evidence that the South, while 
undoubtedly changing, was not necessarily shedding its regional identity. Ultimately, Reed 
argued, the South, both urban and rural, would continue to be a distinctive region:  
For a long time to come, we can expect that the South will be 
something more than simply the lower right-hand part of the 
country. Although the region is, in some respects, rejoining the 
Union at last, the accommodation is a tentative one. Southerners 
continue to see themselves as different—and, in some ways, they 
are different (Reed 1972: 90). 
 
Reed‘s enduring South is evident, to a degree, on television. It can be seen in the 
remarkable staying power of The Andy Griffith Show. That program was deeply rooted in its 
geography, and probably would not be so enduring if it was not still somehow relevant to current 
southern values. The endurance can also be seen in Jeff Foxworthy‘s redneck revival and in the 
recent theatrical remake of The Dukes of Hazzard, which suggested that the South had not 
changed much since the General Lee had last been taken out of the barn in 1985. The staying 
power of southern identity is also subtly evident in such relatively recent programs as Evening 
Shade, The Client, Savannah, State of Grace, and American Gothic. Although these programs 
dispensed with some of the more stereotypical traits of southern culture, it would be somewhat 
difficult to imagine any of them taking place in Vermont, Iowa, or Oregon.  
 
658 
 
WROBEL AND STEINER‘S MANY WESTS 
Many Wests is a 1997 collection of essays, edited by historian David M. Wrobel and 
American Studies scholar Michael C. Steiner, concerning regional identity in the West. A few of 
those essays provide interesting parallels to the television landscape, including historian John M. 
Findlay‘s examination of regional identity in the Pacific Northwest. Findlay noted that the region 
―has generally not been a place people come from . . . . Rather, it has been a destination to which 
other Americans have gone. This fact looms large for explaining regional identity‖ (Findlay 
1997: 45). Although Findlay was speaking for only one section of the West, he observed one of 
the most common traits found on western television programs. The story of a recent arrival to the 
West has been told many times on television, in every era and, in fact, in nearly every state.  
Whereas Findlay‘s observation reveals a part of western identity that television got right, 
historian Anne F. Hyde‘s essay concerning the extractive industry in the Rocky Mountains 
reveals much about what television has missed or, at least, misrepresented. Hyde included in her 
essay a series of descriptions of the Rocky Mountains that both celebrated its stunning natural 
scenery and decried the environmental and social destruction that has accompanied the region‘s 
extractive industries. Hyde wrote:   
What seems oddly combined in these scenes—stunning beauty, 
hideous destruction, and human pain—characterized much of the 
culture and landscape that has developed in the Rocky Mountain 
region . . . . Two major features make [this region] distinctive: the 
inhospitable but spectacular nature of mountains and high plains, 
and the overwhelming presence of extractive industries . . . . 
Certainly the beauty of the landscape is significant in the way 
people have come to define the region, but this chapter focuses on 
extractive industries because they are crucial in understanding the 
―place‖ that has developed here. The reality of this place stands in 
stark opposition to the ―Rocky Mountain High‖ imagined by 
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wannabe Westerners and Westerners themselves, largely because 
of the shaping power of extractive industries (Hyde 1997: 95). 
 
Of the extractive industries analyzed by Hyde—furs, mining, ranching, water sales, and 
skiing—only ranching has received much exposure on television. There have been occasional 
references to mining and skiing on western television programs, but practically no mention of the 
fur trade or water sales. More important, although there has been no shortage of ―stunning 
beauty‖ and ―human pain,‖ few depictions exist of the hideous social and environmental 
destruction described by Hyde. The topic was dealt with earnestly on Centennial and 
sarcastically on South Park, but the story of the extractive industry in the television West has 
largely been one of triumph, rather than devastation.  
As noted in chapter seven, one of the most common characteristics of the television 
western is the story of an aloof individual taming a chaotic and lawless frontier. Hyde confirmed 
that this was a common and very real western story, and provided insight into its origin:  
The landscape—scraped, uprooted, excavated, deforested, and 
eaten—became a testament to the junk-heap mentality encouraged 
by extractive industries. The rapidity of development and the 
calamity of decline, characterized by the boom-bust cycle of these 
industries, affected families, communities, and landscapes, 
creating, in journalist Ed Marston‘s words, a world ―without social 
glue.‖ The lack of social glue had serious implications. Without it, 
communities and cultures cannot hope to weather storms of 
instability and social change, and few places show much success at 
this in the Rocky Mountain region. Community in general in the 
West does not have a high profile. Our most famous western 
characters . . . celebrate their disconnectedness to place and 
community. Whether or not we take seriously the utterly 
dysfunctional sorts like Jeremiah Johnson or any of Clint 
Eastwood‘s characters, this personality type represents reality 
(Hyde 1997: 101). 
 
660 
 
If Hyde is correct, then the television western has not necessarily misrepresented the 
personalities and situations of the frontier West. Instead, it has misrepresented or at least omitted 
the forces that created them. Western television shows imply that chaos and lawlessness were 
endemic to the frontier—that these characteristics should be expected from such a youthful 
culture—and suggest that, over time, they would be overcome by civilizing forces. The notion 
that tempestuous places and rugged individuals were byproducts of extractive industries has been 
nearly absent from the region‘s television programs.    
One of the central questions posed by Many Wests is whether or not a western identity 
still exists. American regional literature suggests that such regional identity is tied up in that 
which has been lost. From this perspective, many American places could be likened to an 
individual mourning for lost youth—the Mid-Atlantic for its passing industrial might, New 
England for its Yankee villages, the Midwest for its prosperous farms and pleasant small towns, 
and the South for antebellum grace. This is especially true, it appears, of the West. In the arts, 
including television, the term ―western‖ is strongly associated with a bygone era. Contemporary 
or modern television westerns exist, of course, such as New Mexico‘s Empire, but the term has 
almost always been applied to programs set in the nineteenth century. Bonanza, The Virginian, 
The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, The Rifleman, and Laramie are 
emblematic series.  
Wrobel and Steiner noted that the Old West depicted on these programs was being 
mourned as early as 1902, when Owen Wister wrote of a ―vanished world‖ of ―the horseman, the 
cowpuncher, the last romantic figure upon our soil‖ (Wrobel and Steiner 1997: 4). They added:    
The once rugged West is dead. Crushed between corporate glaciers 
from the coasts—from Wall Street and from Silicon Valley, from 
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Houston and from Hollywood—the true West as a wide-open place 
of promise is gone. All that remains are commercialized travesties 
of the real thing—manufactured moccasins and kachina dolls, 
franchised Santa Fe cuisine, packaged dude ranches, and other 
regional kitsch for bored urbanites craving tokens of authenticity 
(Wrobel and Steiner 1997: 2).  
 
Television bears out Wrobel and Steiner. Only a few characteristics associated with 
conventional westerns—rugged and attractive vistas, the newcomer, the transition from a rugged 
past to a more polished and sophisticated present, and tough characters in rough situations—
remain as standard fare in the region‘s modern programs. Moreover, since 1970, only a few of 
the region‘s contemporary programs, such as Caitlin‟s Way, Nakia, Harts of the West, and Hey 
Dude, could be called westerns, and even that is a bit of a stretch.  
The question, then, is whether or not a broad, cohesive sense of regional identity exists in 
television‘s modern West. The same litmus test applied to the South can be used here—asking if 
the West‘s contemporary television shows could have been set elsewhere. Some of the region‘s 
television programs do not have particularly strong thematic connections to their setting. Mork & 
Mindy, for example, probably would not have played differently if the title alien had, after his 
debut on Happy Days, simply headed up the road to Madison, Wisconsin, rather than west to 
Boulder, Colorado. Similarly, although Dynasty did concern a natural resource empire and had 
some Denver touches, the show probably would not have changed much if the Carrington 
mansion had been located in Scarsdale, New York.  
Many contemporary western programs, however, do return a relatively strong sense of 
place. It is difficult to imagine Reno 911 or Roswell taking place anywhere but their title cities, 
and the same can be said for most Las Vegas programs, although that city‘s most iconic show, 
CSI, has been successfully franchised in Miami and New York. Frasier, Grey‟s Anatomy, and 
662 
 
Twin Peaks are also firmly entrenched in their settings, and it would be difficult to imagine Alice 
if her car had broken down in Cincinnati, rather than Phoenix, or to imagine South Park taking 
place anywhere but the Colorado Rockies. Still, while these programs have much to say about 
their particular settings, it is impossible to argue that any of them speak for the entire West. This 
idea parallels a statement by Wrobel and Steiner, who observed, ―The West probably does have 
certain defining characteristics, but they are not readily and evenly applicable to all parts of the 
West‖ (Wrobel and Steiner 1997: 11).  
It is not a sense of place that is lacking in the television West, but a sense of regional 
cohesiveness. In their search for regional identity in the contemporary West, Wrobel and Steiner 
asked: 
Is state identification more important than regional identification in 
the West or in some parts of the West? . . . . Or does locality 
overshadow state, subregion, and broader region as a foundation of 
regional consciousness? . . . . Have scholars slighted the regional 
consciousness of western urban dwellers—the bulk of the West‘s 
present population—by emphasizing the relationship between 
sense of place and attachment to the land? (Wrobel and Steiner 
1997: 15-16).  
 
Television‘s answer to the last question is that critics are, indeed, far more likely to discuss 
regional identity in the West‘s small-town and rural programs than they are when writing about 
urban shows. The critical literature does not suggest that Phoenix‘s Alice, Las Vegas‘s CSI, 
Seattle‘s Frasier, or Reno 911 lacked a sense of place, but critics analyzing Everwood, South 
Park, or Twin Peaks were far more likely to write about those show‘s western identity than 
critics reviewing their urban counterparts.  
What is far more apparent on television, however, is that, on programs with a 
contemporary setting, locality and subregion tend to overshadow broader identifications. In other 
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words, the West seems, both in reality and in television‘s version of it, to be incredibly nebulous. 
It is arguable that this was true even on traditional westerns. Bonanza, The Virginian, and The 
Rifleman were westerns to be sure, but more important, they were frontier programs. Robbed of 
the frontier, the television West lost regional cohesiveness. Again, a strong sense of place can be 
found on many contemporary western television programs, but it is a collection of Las Vegas, 
Pacific Northwest, Colorado, Sun Belt, and other senses of place, but not wholly ―western.‖ In 
other words, it is not inaccurate to suggest that Alice, Grey‟s Anatomy, CSI, and South Park are 
representative of the West, but these shows represent the West in the same way that Roseanne, 
The Sopranos, Miami Vice, The Dukes of Hazzard and Cheers represent the East. In this way, the 
television landscape confirms a statement by Carey McWilliams and Wallace Stegner, who 
wrote that the West‘s subregions are ―all so different in their history and ethnic compositions, 
that . . . trying to make a unanimous culture out of them would be a hopeless job. It would be like 
wrapping five watermelons‖ (Wrobel and Steiner 1997: 9).