October 17, 2004 in Features

Television heads South – once again

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Associated Press photo

Jeff Foxworthy, center, is joined by Larry the Cable Guy, left, and Bill Engvall on the set of WB’s “Blue Collar TV.”
(Full-size photo)

Listen up, y’all. It’s looking like the South is rising again – at least on TV.

The sketch-comedy revue “Blue Collar TV” is the biggest comedy hit the WB has ever had, surpassing the network’s Reba McEntire sitcom “Reba” (which ain’t exactly “Maude”).

And Rodney Carrington, a stand-up comic from Oklahoma with a drawl as pronounced as Billy Bob Thornton’s, has his own comedy series, “Rodney,” on ABC.

Two or three shows may not a trend make. But it’s a change worth noting, considering how long shows set below the Mason-Dixon Line have been out of favor.

Their heyday? That would be the 1960s, of all decades. Vietnam may have dominated the news and British rock bands the radio airwaves, but prime-time TV was awash in grits and gravy.

Chalk it up to a national nostalgia for simpler, more bucolic times or to sheer coincidence, but shows with Southern roots dominated Nielsen’s top 20: “The Real McCoys.” “The Beverly Hillbillies” and its spinoffs, “Petticoat Junction” and “Green Acres.” The enduringly beloved “Andy Griffith Show.”

As late as 1969, CBS was still riding the wave of Southern comfort, adding yet another countrified hit, a hillbilly “Laugh-In” called “Hee Haw,” to its schedule.

Southern/rural TV’s great depression arrived in the fall of 1971. Sensing an urban shift in the nation, CBS discarded its country and small-town shows wholesale, even though many of them were still top 20 performers, to make room for city-oriented series such as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “All in the Family.”

Until recently, CBS continued to be the network most likely to give a Southerner an even break – “The Waltons,” “Dallas,” “Designing Women” and, if you must, “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

Generally speaking, though, TV programmers haven’t extended shows set in the South or featuring Southern-sounding characters heaping helpings of hospitality.

The bias continues to this day, even though millions of Americans have migrated to Sunbelt states, NASCAR has gone from being the sport of moonshiners to a major, national TV sport, and four of our last five presidents have Southern connections.

It doesn’t take a country-fried conspiracy theorist to observe that TV shows get green-lighted in New York and L.A. by people who are always on the lookout for the next hip thing and, as a rule, don’t often stray far from their rarified enclaves.

Consider what almost happened to “Rodney.” The series, drawn from the life experience of the Texas-born Carrington, is set in Tulsa, Okla., where he and his real family make their home. But Carrington says that didn’t shield him from questions about why he and his sitcom family couldn’t live in Chicago.

“I couldn’t believe they were even asking that,” he says.

At least Carrington got to keep his roots. When Alabama-bred Brett Butler landed on ABC in “Grace Under Fire” (1993-98), the show was set in suburban St. Louis.

“They took somebody with a Southern accent and a Southern past and then put her in a blue-collar environment in the Midwest,” says Ted Ownby, a professor of history and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi. “I never quite understood why that was necessary.”

David Janollari, the WB’s president of entertainment, believes the Southern/rural audience is underserved and that it is responding to the reflection of its sensibility in such WB shows as “Reba”; “One Tree Hill,” which is set in a small town in North Carolina; and now “Blue Collar TV.”

Its sketches often celebrate and mock Southerners’ stubborn excesses at the same time. A family at a fancy restaurant, for instance, is mortified that the cuisine doesn’t come flooded in brown gravy.

The show is a permutation of the hugely successful Blue Collar Comedy tour cooked up three years ago by Jeff Foxworthy, the Georgia-based comic whose “You know you’re a redneck if …” jokes earned him a national following (and a short-lived ABC sitcom).

He’s joined by two of his touring companions: Bill Engvall, who hails from Galveston, Texas, and Dan Whitney, aka “Larry the Cable Guy,” who’s originally from Pawnee, Neb.

When Foxworthy was asked why “redneck” had given way to “blue collar,” he said he and his cohorts felt the latter had more of an “everyman” ring.

But he also argued that Southern humor, whatever it’s labeled, has an appeal that transcends regions.

“Funny is funny,” he says. “I mean, ‘Seinfeld’ worked in Alabama because Jerry is funny. And, you know, Jerry never gets labeled ‘the Northern comedy of Jerry Seinfeld.’

“I’ve found that, after 20 years of being on the road, when you get 15 minutes outside of every city, people are the same,” he continues. “It’s not a Southern thing. I used to feel like I was beating my head against the wall in New York and L.A., trying to explain that.”

“Cable Guy” Whitney, whose comedy wouldn’t be out of place on the Grand Ole Opry, says his experience is similar.

“When I did all my stuff on the radio and got my big following in comedy clubs, hardly ever did I work in the South,” he says. He says most of his gigs were in “the Midwest, the Northeast, Delaware, Vermont, New Hampshire, Baltimore, Maine. I mean, everywhere.”

While the network is happy with the rowdy sketch series’ ratings, the WB’s Janollari is hesitant to read much larger lessons into its success.

“I wouldn’t just replicate these shows and sort of chase the Southern mentality just for the sake of it,” he says. “But I look at ‘Reba’ and ‘Blue Collar TV’ and say there is an audience that wants to watch this voice and this world put up on the screen. So I would absolutely be open to more shows that stem from this point of view.”

We’ll know the industry as a whole is getting the message when we see “CSI: Tuscaloosa.”

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