About the Campaign

In 2003 the Center for Rural Strategies launched a national campaign to stop CBS Television from producing "The Real Beverly Hillbillies," a reality show based the network's old sit-com. The concept was simple: Take a poor family from somewhere in rural America and set them up in California with all the trappings of affluence. Then let the cameras roll as the family copes with rich neighbors, electronic gadgets, and cultural clashes.

CBS defended the proposed reality series as a classic "fish-out-of-water" story. But Rural Strategies and thousands of people and organizations across the country said the network was going too far in setting up rural America for ridicule based on misunderstanding and intentional stereotyping. After months of activities that included ads in the New York Times and other major newspapers, an email and fax campaign, extensive press coverage, a meeting with CBS President Leslie Moonves, and a protest with United Mine Workers outside a stockholders' meeting of Viacom, which owns the TV network, CBS dropped the proposed series.

The campaign not only killed the series. It launched a new kind of national conversation about the future of rural America and the relationship of metropolitan and rural communities. For Rural Strategies, the "Rural Reality Campaign," as we called it, showed the power of communications to mobilize the public conscience in support of fairness for rural people and others who find themselves at the margins of the nation's culture and economy.