For the four seasons Route 66 aired on the CBS television network, some local CBS affiliates assisted in the show's production. A news remote truck and news cameras from WREC-TV (Memphis, Tennessee) were used in this particular episode. The station's call letters were changed to WREG-TV in 1971 and, as of September 2011, is still a CBS affiliate.
The "Pagliaccis" of the title is the Italian word for clowns, made famous by the opera "Pagliacci", by Ruggero Leoncavallo. The title here is meant to be a kind of sarcastic comment on the people and media surrounding the trial in this story.
The reason the story was set in Hernando, MS was so that the viewer would associate the fictional author Warren Barr with the real life William Faulkner, who had just died a few months before the show's production. His stories were often based on small towns in northern Mississippi and Barry Sullivan was carefully made up to closely resemble Faulkner.