Petticoat Junction is an American situation comedy. The series is one of three interrelated shows about rural characters created by Paul Henning. The characters “seem” to go to Hooterville for some goods and services, including high school and the hospital, but prefer Pixley for supermarket shopping, beauty parlors, and movies.

The petticoat of the title is an old-fashioned garment once worn under a woman’s skirt. The opening titles of the series featured a display of petticoats hanging on the side of the railway’s water tower where the three originally teenage daughters are apparently bathing in the nude or skinny-dipping. In fact, the show’s opening theme contains a hint of sexual innuendo in the line, “Lotsa curves, you bet, and even more when you get to the Junction.” This is an obvious double entendre referring to both the train tracks and the Bradley daughters. However, as Linda Kaye states on the official season one DVD set, the name of the town Hooterville was not a reference to the slang term “hooters” meaning breasts, because that term was unheard of in the 1960s.

Young Rhoda Penmark is sweet, smart … and inherently evil! After a school chum dies during a picnic, no one suspects Rhoda, except the janitor of her apartment building. But when Rhoda’s mother finds out that her own mother was a cold-blooded killer, she begins to suspect Rhoda might be the victim of some faulty genetics.

Professional photographer L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries breaks his leg while getting an action shot at an auto race. Confined to his New York apartment, he spends his time looking out of the rear window observing the neighbors. He begins to suspect that a man across the courtyard may have murdered his wife. Jeff enlists the help of his high society fashion-consultant girlfriend Lisa Freemont and his visiting nurse Stella to investigate.

A frustrated former big-city journalist now stuck working for an Albuquerque newspaper exploits a story about a man trapped in a cave to revitalize his career, but the situation quickly escalates into an out-of-control media circus.