n. A TV or film genre that features stereotypical depictions of rural people, particularly those from the American South.
2014
Robertson is the biggest star of the biggest boom in reality TV: hicksploitation. The genre laughs at (and sometimes with) the last group of people it’s still ostensibly OK to stereotype — white backwoodsy men.
2012
A two-fisted tale of dumb deals, double-crosses, murder, barter gone bad and love gone sour, the film flirts with trailer-trash hicksploitation in its outrageous exploration of the darker side of the human soul.
2001 (earliest)
It’s not that hard to make a passable hicksploitation film. You churn out a script revolving around either a lone lawman fighting small town corruption or an ex-con who is trying to resist returning to a life of crime, yet gets pressured into breaking the law by small town corruption.
The familiar (to North American eyes, anyway) word hick, "an unsophisticated, uneducated person from a small town or rural area," is surprisingly old. The Oxford English Dictionary has a cite from 1565, plus an example from a 1699 dictionary: "Hick, any Person of whom any Prey can be made." The word is a casual form of the name Richard.