Lisa Douglas (née Gronyitz) was the leading female character in the 1960s CBS situation comedy Green Acres, which ran for six years, from 1965 to 1971. The character was reprised in the 1990 film Return to Green Acres. CNN rated the character as being amongst "The most stylish TV housewives of all time".
Character background
Lisa (portrayed by actress Eva Gabor), a glamorous Hungarian immigrant, plays the role of the wife of
Oliver Wendell Douglas, a successful New York City attorney who had long harbored the dream of moving to the Midwest and operating a farm. The leitmotif of the character through the years remains her comedic Hungarian accent and naivety, which leads to numerous jocular interactions with the Hooterville locals, who mishear Lisa's statements and are likewise misheard by Lisa. Both Lisa and Oliver are regularly portrayed as wearing city clothes, which seem misfit in the Hooterville expanse. Lisa's penchant for wearing resplendent jewelry, costly dresses and heeled footwear adds to this characterization through the seasons.
Timeline
In the initial episodes, Lisa plays a Manhattan socialite who has no desire to leave the luxuries of her lifestyle in New York, After shifting to Hooterville, she becomes close to many farm animals, especially to the neighboring family's pet piglet Arnold, and takes up various cooking activities.
thumb|180px|[[Eva Gabor's portrayal of Lisa Douglas, featured above in the 1965 show-premiere publicity image, garnered broad critical acclaim]]
As the episodes progress, it is Lisa who becomes comfortably enmeshed with the Hooterville life, undertaking various entrepreneurial and philanthropic activities, while Oliver faces numerous challenges, both in his entrepreneurial work and philanthropic orientation. At the same time, Lisa's character has been reviewed broadly as being amongst select "familiar and congenial" television characters, those which offered the American audiences an "escape and a sense that order might yet prevail."
Larry Karaszewski writes in the USC Spectator: "While Mr. Douglas thinks he is a 'real farmer', Mrs. Douglas has no such pretensions. She simply is what she is and the citizens of Hooterville accept her for being herself [...] Much of Green Acres is about a communications gap and Lisa is central to the gap."