Filmways, once at the top of their game with rural themed sitcoms, had fell victim to what is dubbed the rural purge. Stuff like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies, while great, would no longer fly on the network and Filmways had to get creative, while getting the rest of the last season over with.
This was among one of two backdoor pilots that closed off Green Acres, to some pretty underwhelming reactions, felt to this day, and believe me I understand the problems people had with it, especially as it led to an underwhelming end of the series.
But what we have here is a rough idea for how a potential new series would go, and I imagine this was made up relatively quickly while production on Green Acres was still on, they didn't have a whole lot of time or resources to make a new pilot from scratch.
The new characters needed to be focused on so we have an idea who we're supposed to be rooting for and focusing on, but as this was part of Green Acres there needed to be some kind of connection to justify its presence on the show, even the kind of humor it's going for, like they were straying from the live action cartoon schtick present in Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres. I feel like they were backed into a corner on this.
I came into vintage sitcoms relatively late, so I'm still learning about what agitated people, otherwise not understanding until I look deeper into it, and seeing this episode in a vacuum, and being aware that this was just a backdoor pilot, I at least get the deal behind it.
Wasn't horrendously bad, knowing the context helped ease me into it. Would Pam had worked as a series? Who knows, but it's hard to judge the quality of a series if all you had to go by was a rough pilot, think people were just mad about how this got jammed into Green Acres and the hurt persisted to this day.
It's not that bad, upper mid at the very least.
