The show sucked in 1979. It had nothing to do with the flag.
Well it did replace The Incredible Hulk on the 8:00PM Friday timeslot on CBS in about 1981, lol.
Yeah, it was one of a serious of TV shows set in the South that was born in the Jimmy Carter years. Each show was worse than the other.
Notice how different the take on the South was when Bill Clinton came to the White House and you had such snobby liberal elitist shows like “Designing Women”.