Return to Green Acres

Apparently William Asher never watched any 60's TV besides Bewitched. Otherwise he'd have seen Green Acres at least once and had a clue how to direct "Return".

Pure garbage is place for this, lame story is a total miss. Jokes falling flat far and wide. Give me the original and let's pretend that Bill never tried.

This is the worst remake of anything I can recall.

It would have been much better to have made a 2 hour reunion of the cast to reminisce about the original show.

The writers must have worked from a list of character bios and reverse engineered this travesty while completely missing everything that made the series awesome. I'm sorry I watched it and will never make that mistake again.

I'm saddened by the negative user reviews posted about this tv reunion. I agree it wasn't the offbeat humor from the original series but it was still nice to see so many of the cast members together again. Also, I just can't believe Eddie Albert would trash this movie on a talk show or to anyone. I met him in the late 1980's and everyone or thing he spoke about was with an honest, pleasant, upbeat demeanor. In fact I've never read or heard any negative remarks about anyone in the cast. Enjoy it for what it is and not for what others think it should have been.

This is probably the second-worst TV reunion show ever. While the honor for the worst goes to the Beverly Hillbillies reunion, this one is only marginally better. First off, the show begins by explaining that Oliver and Lisa had moved back to New York and had been living there many years!! This NEVER could have happened in the TV series and in many ways makes the show irrelevant--after all, what's funny about moving to Hootersville and then leaving because it DID suck after all?! Secondly, like the Hillbilly TV movie, a lot of the cast was dead or near-dead. Fred Zipfel was dead and Mr. Haney just looked dead (he was very sickly and died soon afterward). And the rest of them just looked old and tired. It was pretty sad watching this mess, as it just wasn't the same. It's true you can never really go back.

Yes, it missed the mark big time. I've always felt that reunion shows of this ilk (i.e.,old 30-minute sitcoms) should be done in the same 30-minute time-frame. And, in this particular case, should have been done on similar sets as the TV show instead of filming outdoors in real settings. Because the producers and/or writers chose real-life settings for this reunion show AND stretched it to two hours, the look and feel of the show was completely alien to the original series. For me, that was the first glaring mistake. They should have stuck to the cheap indoor sets and made it a half-hour long. Maybe then they could've used the money they'd have saved and spent it on better writers, because the next glaring mistake was the bad writing. It stuck out like a sore thumb. I give this movie two stars instead of one, because the only endearing aspect of this "mistake" was seeing most of the original cast together again.

I agree with the previous reviewer who said that this reunion movie must have been written by someone who had never seen the original show. In a way, Green Acres was like Seinfeld for the 1960s, in that there were no lessons or morals learned and very little seriousness or sentimentality - just lots of weird humor (except for some lovey-dovey scenes between Oliver and Lisa at the end of some episodes). This is also a show that had a lot of fun breaking the 4th wall, with characters making references to the opening credits and such. That said, what on earth were the writers thinking when they wrote this movie? The movie isn't even funny - did they forget that Green Acres was supposed to be a comedy? The plot is very cliched - a greedy business man conspires with Mr. Haney to buy everyone's property in Hooterville and turn it into a mall or something. This results in many serious, sappy scenes that have none of the wacky flavor of the original. We even have a "lesson," as Eb's teenage son learns to appreciate his rural hometown instead of thinking it's boring. We also have a romance between the Ziffels' niece and the businessman's son, which I think only makes the show drag even more. Stick with the original - the only reason to watch this movie is if you're curious to see how the cast looked after 20 years.