This idyllic Sitcom, which ran on CBS from 1960 to 1968, starred Andy Griffith as Andy Taylor. It remains enormously popular in reruns. At any hour of any day, some television station in the US is playing the show (If you live in North Carolina, you cannot go a week without finding it in your local TV listings... which is not a bad thing).Andy is The Sheriff of a small, friendly town called Mayberry, in North Carolina. Despite his authoritarian role, Andy is an easy-going, good-humored guy. He can be tough when the situation demands it, but he prefers to play loose with the rules, and adapt punishments according to the nature of the crime and the individual. His deputy and cousin friend Barney Fife prefers the opposite approach, but since he is clumsy and totally lacking in gravitas, no one takes him seriously. Most of the humor from the early years of the show comes from Barney's attempts to bring law and order to an already lawful and orderly town, and Andy's subsequent ribbing of Barney when his plans go wrong. Very frequently, Andy will resort to a counter-scheme to protect Barney's fragile ego and what's left of his reputation as a lawman.The series also focuses on the widowed Andy's relationship with his young son Opie, with Andy trying to strike a balance between being a fun confidant and instilling a strong sense of right and wrong. Andy dated a few women over the course of the series, but Opie's mother figure was Aunt Bee, who lived in the Taylor home and took care of the housework. Andy was also alternately amused and exasperated by the eccentricities of the townfolk, like gossipy barber Floyd, highly repressed bureaucrat Howard Sprague, and totally moronic hayseed Gomer Pyle, who was spun off and replaced with his even more idiotic cousin Goober.Supporting actors included Don Knotts as Deputy Barney Fife; Ron Ronny Howard (pre-Happy Days) as Andy's son, Opie; Frances Bavier as Andy's Aunt Bee Taylor, and George Lindsey and Jim Nabors as the Pyle cousins, Goober and Gomer Pyle.
This series provides examples of:
Actor Allusion: As Warren, Jack Burns would occasionally use his stand up trademark of making a statement to another character then saying "huh?" "huh?" "huh?" until then when the other character shouts an agreement with him to get him to shut up.
Semi-Subverted from time to time. Often, Andy would attempt to teach Opie a lesson (don't be selfish) which Opie seems to misunderstand (buying a gift for a girl, instead). Turns out Opie already understands (the gift is a winter coat that the girl's family couldn't afford), and the lesson learned is that Andy should trust Opie.
The Danza: Andy Griffith as Andy Taylor and Elinor Donahue as Ellie Walker
Dinner Order Flub: While in Mount Pilot, Andy & Barney go to a fancy French restaurant. Andy isn't too proud to say he can't read the menu and just orders a steak. Barney points to menu items and gets stuff he never thought of as food.
Early Installment Weirdness: In the pilot, Andy and Barney are cousins. This is never mentioned again after the first two episodes. Also, for most of the first season, Griffith played Andy more as a country bumpkin than the straight man role he played in the rest of the series.
Hey, It's That Guy!: Lot of guest stars, though this troper remembers Lee Van Cleef in a very small role as—surprise—a bad guy in the carnival episode.
A then-unknown Jack Nicholson is also in some brief scenes in one of the later episodes.
Hidden Badass: Andy isn't exactly an action hero, but he's not to be messed with lightly.
Luxury Prison Suite, to some extent: home-cooked meals, harmless town drunk Otis being allowed to come and go as he pleases by means of a key deliberately left in reach of his cell, etc.
Men Can't Keep House: Played with; Andy and Opie are at first able to clean up the house really well while Aunt Bee is gone, but then they fear she will feel they won't need them. They decide they have to mess the house up all over again.
Miles Gloriosus: Barney often boasts about how he'd easily handle some troublemaker — until the actual trouble starts.
Nitro Express: Played with in an episode where two yokels who accidentally pick up a container of nitroglycerin (somehow mistaking it for fertilizer) manhandle it for the entire episode. It is only when it is dropped down a well that it finally explodes.
The Other Darrin: Ben Weaver, the department store owner, was played by three different actors over the course of the show.
Four different actors played Wally, the owner of the filling station.
The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: By the later seasons, Andy seemed to have very little to do in the way of actual sheriffing. To the point where he didn't even need another deputy after Warren's departure.
Poorly Disguised Pilot: "Gomer Pyle, USMC", which had the character join the Marines and led to the spinoff show of the same title.
Put on a Bus: Barney goes off to join the Raleigh police force at the end of season 5.
However, he continued to return for annual guest appearances over the rest of the series.
Reality Subtext: Griffith is a native Tarheel. Mayberry is a pastiche of Mt. Airy, where he grew up.
And being on the show so endeared the state to Frances Bavier that she moved there (specifically to Siler City) later in life.
Howard McNear (Floyd The Barber) had a severe stroke during the run, and upon returning could not walk or stand on his own. He thereafter was always shown sitting or leaning against an object, and would "walk" across the room off camera. When worsening health required him to leave permanently, Floyd retired and the barbershop became Emmett's Fix-It Shop.
Recurring Character: Several, including crotchety storekeeper Ben Weaver, musical hillbilly family the Darlings, hotheaded mountain man Ernest T. Bass, itinerant Englishman Malcolm Merriweather, and Mt. Pilot "fun girls" Skippy and Daphne.
Reunion Show: The TV movie Return to Mayberry (1986)
Smoking Is Cool: Andy lit up several times during the black-and-white era, one prominent example being in the episode "Mr. McBeevee" (after a scene where Andy confronts Opie about whether McBeevee exists); in that same episode, McBeevee (a telephone lineman, played by Karl Swenson, a heavy smoker throughout his life) also smokes.
Most of the smoking was reserved for various bit and bad-guy characters. Deputy Barney Fife was a non-smoker, although Don Knotts was a real-life smoker.
Spin-Off: This series was a spinoff of The Danny Thomas Show, one episode of which actually was a sort of Poorly Disguised Pilot for this series; and it spawned two spinoffs of its own: Gomer Pyle USMC and Mayberry RFD (although the latter can arguably be seen as more a Re Tool of the original).
There was also a 1971 series called The New Andy Griffith Show which was a sort of very obvious Spiritual Successor, featuring Griffith in a similar role. Bizarrely, the later show's pilot episode had three old TAGS characters - Barney Fife, Goober Pyle, and Emmett Clark - traveling from Mayberry to the new show's setting of Greenwood, NC to congratulate friend "Andy Sawyer" on his new job as mayor. It's pretty surprising none of them noticed how similar their friend Andy Sawyer was to their hometown sheriff pal Andy Taylor!
You Look Familiar: Several, but the award goes to Allan Melvin appearing as 8 different characters, many of them central to the episode they appeared in.
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