The Real McCoys

ok ive seen it in reruns and i liked it u have to remember that at the time it was running the old US was still pretty bumpkin and that is what this show was about okies trying to adapt to modern america. it was good and the blonde girl was hott.

"The Real McCoys" encapsulates an entirely Lost World, on so many levels. Firstly, the comedy doesn't translate well into modern tastes. Li'l Abner meets "Grapes of Wrath" only funny, and quite the antecedent of "The Beverly Hillbillies," it still offers a brand of sitcom prefaced on a fairly cringe-worthy topicality of the 1950's: the little woman wifey, hen-peckedness in hubbies, subserviant ranch help, ornery grandparents. Norman Rockwell conquers all isn't buyable to today's viewers, despite able acting from its likeable cast.(And who I ask you, once exposed to him, doesn't like to imitate Walter Brennan's "Little Luke? Little Luke?")

What does make this watchable is the hazy, lost world dreaminess innate to its central plot conceit: that of farming in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California. This was still possible in the mid to late 1950's there when the sitcom was conceived: by as soon as the early 1960's every square inch of the place was already developed or about to be developed into bedroom communities, high density apartments, and future condominiums. It was that speedy a transformation. To give you an idea of how populated the place is today, the San Fernando Valley section of L.A., long considered a poor relation to same, tried to secede from the city proper in the mid-1990's. Had it succeeded, it instantly would have been the sixth largest city in the United States. And unfortunately, much of it has already degenerated into enclaves of lawless illegal immigrants, and a massive Gangland chez L.A., second only to Compton here. So why care, hazy nostalgia or not? Well, in the case of your humble Tv.Com scribe here, I do because I live in one of a half dozen old farmhouses left in the whole entire, vast area, a walnut and citrus farm, built in 1912 in the San Fernando Valley, now entombed in high density housing tracts. Even a weak-premised sitcom of the 1950's is one of the few relics of that Lost World in a city that prefers to raze anything older than two minutes just for tear-downs' sake of reinvention...moreless