User Reviews

The first four episodes were a continuous story about the train being shut down, which would shut down the hotel and, the series: which was being established therein. Two handed-off characters... railroad execs... were going to do it, and the simple but savvy family and locals beat one and won over another

That's a good thing and a bad thing. Good for them might not be great for us because those episodes were very binge-worthy. This, meanwhile, isn't awful, but with a plot-line used in many other shows (even Gunsmoke) about a mail dating service, it's the first actual normal episode of the series. So this review also serves as trivia.

Having exhausted the "they're trying to take our train away" possibilities of the first four episodes, "Petticoat Junction" turned to fleshing out everyday life in the Hooterville Valley in "The Courtship of Floyd Smoot" with that universal standby: the vicissitudes of romance. When the good-natured but naïve fireman on the Hooterville Cannonball finally sends his picture, complete with risible toupee, to his mail-order sweetheart, she promptly returns it, nipping their relationship in the bud. (We'll get to the birds and the bees momentarily.) This naturally plunges Floyd into a funk, but when Kate Bradley tries to buck him up by suggesting that all the local women have been jealous of his long-distance romance, Floyd thinks Kate has the hots for him.

So goes the setup in Ed James and Seaman Jacobs's wry script, which sees Kate's daughters Billie Jo and Bobbie Jo egg Floyd on by asking "Daddy Floyd" to tell them about the birds and the bees. That doesn't quite yield the desired response from the country bumpkin, who promptly breaks into imitations of a bird and a bee, and who can't quite help Betty Jo with her history homework either--surprised to learn that America was at war with Mexico, and then told that that war occurred more than a century ago, he exclaims, "And we haven't whupped them yet?"

The overarching theme--and appeal--of "Petticoat Junction" (and its relations "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Green Acres") was the dynamic between lampooning the supposed backwardness of Middle America and celebrating its equally-reputed time-honored values. In turn, this gentle sitcom spanned the 1960s, a decade that saw vast social, cultural, and political upheaval sweeping across the globe, not simply in the United States, with "Petticoat Junction" caught in the crossfire.

An early series running gag involves Uncle Joe Carson's wooden Indian, a totem (pun sardonically intended) that began life as an advertising symbol of a tobacconist but in time became seen as a racist depiction of Native Americans. As part of the gag, Kate and her daughters are always trying to hide it, presumably for aesthetic and not politically-correct reasons.

In this episode, Uncle Joe reveals that the wooden Indian had been carved by his "great-great-great uncle Kit Carson." This actual Carson was an embodiment of the American frontier in the first half of the 19th century as a trapper, guide, army officer, and Indian agent--and Indian fighter--who was literally a legend in his own time although that view has been revised in re-evaluations of America's westward expansionism, notably with respect to Native Americans.

Until the 1960s, Hollywood Westerns significantly shaped perceptions of the American West symbolized in part by Kit Carson as Edgar Buchanan, Smiley Burnette, and Rufe Davis were all old hands as actors in those Westerns, with Buchanan appearing in 1953's "Shane," a landmark Western that helped to change previous perceptions of the Old West.

Where did "Petticoat Junction" stand on all this? That's the real value of watching this situation comedy now: to see the attitudes and assumptions of its time. "The Courtship of Floyd Smoot" lets on more than it knows.