On this day in 1965, Green Acres debuted on CBS in an age of television free of wall-to-wall commercials and fast paced speakers trying to push the latest deal at the electronics store. The commercials were friendlier and actually contained products people would actually want to buy. Too bad they weren’t advertising, because we could have used some Medifast coupons back then too. The again, we can use them now, can’t we?

After the success of The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction, CBS offered producer Paul Henning another half-hour on the schedule with no pilot required. Lacking the time to commit to another project himself, he encouraged colleague Jay Sommers to create the series. Sommers used his 1950 radio series, Granby’s Green Acres, as the basis for the new television series. The 13-episode radio series had starred Gale Gordon and Bea Benaderet (who also appeared in the TV version) as a big-city family who move to the country.

In pre-production, two proposed titles were Country Cousins and The Eddie Albert Show.[1] Green Acres was about Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert), an accomplished and erudite New York attorney who was acting on his lifelong dream to be a farmer, and Lisa Douglas (Eva Gabor), his glamorously bejeweled Hungarian wife, dragged unwillingly from the privileged city life she adored to a bucolic life on a ramshackle farm. The debut episode was a mock documentary about this big-city attorney’s decision to move to a rural area, narrated by CBS newscaster (and host of the popular game show What’s My Line) John Charles Daly. A few weeks after the show’s debut, Albert and Gabor returned the favor by appearing on What’s My Line as that episode’s Mystery Guests, and afterward publicly thanked Daly for helping to successfully launch their series.

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