AllMovie

With an unbilled Waylon Jennings providing verbal and musical punctuation throughout, the premiere episode of The Dukes of Hazzard chronicles the latest adventures of cousins Luke and Bo Duke (Tom Wopat, John Schneider), a pair of hot-roddin' Good Ole Boys living in Hazzard County ("East of the Mississippi and South of the Ohio") with their sensible Uncle Jesse (Denver Pyle) and their curvaceous female cousin Daisy (Catherine Bach). With their moonshine-running activities "officially" thwarted by the terms of their probation, Luke and Bo have to get their kicks flummoxing and outrunning the local corrupt authorities, rotund county boss Jefferson Davis Hogg (Sorrell Booke) and Hogg's brother-in-law, Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane (James Best, here playing his role along more embittered and less buffoonish lines than he would in future episodes). On this occasion, the Dukes thwart Roscoe's latest crooked enterprise, namely smuggling slot machines across the border, by hijacking the machines and giving the money therein to local orphanages and charities. Naturally, Roscoe tries to arrest the boys, only to find that he'll make a public fool of himself--and probably be voted out of office--if he takes any action at all! Ernie W. Brown, here cast as Dobro Dullyn, would later return in the semiregular role of L.B. Davenport. This is the first of five episodes filmed on location in Covington, Georgia.