To say that Carter Country was based on the show "In The Heat of the Night" is pretty much stretching the imagination. Granted it has a college-educated black man working as a Sergeant in a Sheriff's department full of red-necks but that is as about as far as you can go with the similarities. If I remember right this was an ABC sitcom. It was put on the air to capitalize on then President Jimmy Carter's name (after all he was from Georgia and I believe the setting was in Georgia). But if you actually watched the show you recognized that they were taking liberties with ABC hit police comedy "Barney Miller". Like Barney Miller the show dealt with the workings of the small Sheriff's department and the type of crime, criminals and other things that they had to deal with. Almost all of the action took place in the sheriff's office (Barney Miller was in the 12th precinct)and occasionally you saw the home of the Sheriff or the deputies.
I suppose other similarities can drawn looking at shows like "Beverly Hillbillies", "Petticoat Junction", "Green Acres", even "The Andy Griffith Show" as these shows also were about rural people, some from the South.
Carter Country was an extremely funny, well-written show that just never got off the ground and that was too bad. I mean when idiotic stereotyping shows like "Dukes of Hazzard" can last as long as it did you would think Carter Country should have had a better chance.
