YMMV / The Andy Griffith Show

• Award Snub: Not only did Andy Griffith never win an Emmy Award for the show, he was never even nominated.
• Awesome Music: The theme song, also called "The Fishing Hole." It's a very simple piece of music, consisting primarily of one man whistling, but it effortlessly pulls off Mayberry's signature cozy and laid-back feel.
• Designated Villain: Ralph Case from "The Inspector." The episode presents him like an uptight city official who's unfamiliar with informal country life but he is correct that the Mayberry Police Department is unprofessionally lax. Barney is unable to carry a loaded gun properly, the jailhouse cells are overly furnished for the benefit of repeat offenders like Otis and Andy treats an armed shooter like a harmless local nuisance.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The mid Season 3 episode "Convicts At Large" is actor Howard McNear's final appearance as Floyd Lawson before the actor suffered a debilitating stroke that sidelined him until near the end of Season 4, and subsequently limited him to almost always sitting down. In said episode, Floyd comically gets a vase smashed over his head by one of the titular convicts.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • All the times the male characters wished they could be as good with the ladies as Rock Hudson. In one episode, Barney says that he learned how to sweet talk ladies by watching "all those Rock Hudson movies". Later on, it would be publicly known that Hudson was a gay man locked in the closet by Hollywood.
  • In the episode "Man In a Hurry", the titular character happened to be named Malcolm Tucker.
  • In "The Farmer Takes a Wife", Alan Hale Jr. plays a farmer who often calls Barney "little buddy". Hale would later use that phrase on his co-star in another television series.
• Ho Yay: In "Mountain Wedding", Ernest T. Bass doesn't seem to mind the fact that Barney's a guy after seeing him disguised in Charlene Darling's wedding dress, even asking him to dance at Charlene's wedding party.
• I Am Not Shazam: Despite what the title may suggest, Andy Griffith's character's last name is Taylor, not Griffith.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • George Lindsey would later reprise Goober on Hee Haw.
  • Lee Van Cleef, in a very small role as—surprise—a bad guy in the episode "Banjo-Playing Deputy".
  • A then-unknown Jack Nicholson in some brief scenes in the episodes "Opie Finds a Baby" and "Aunt Bee the Juror".
  • Pre-M*A*S*H Jamie Farr and William Christopher had made memorable guest appearances; Farr as part of a band of Romani in "The Gypsies", and Christopher in two episodes: as a tax collector in "Aunt Bee on TV", and as Mayberry's new town doctor, Doc Peterson, in "A New Doctor in Town".
  • Much earlier, a pre-I Dream of Jeannie Barbara Eden arrives in Mayberry as the town's pretty new manicurist in "The Manicurist".
  • Arte Johnson- later of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In- appeared as a hotel clerk in "Andy and Barney in the Big City".
  • Rob Reiner appeared in the seventh season episode "Goober's Contest".
  • Harry Dean Stanton appears in "Howard's New Life" from Season 8.
  • Recognizing the voice of Howard Morris (Ernest T. Bass, frequent director) from later cartoon roles like Gopher in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Hamburglar and Mayor McCheese for McDonald's, and Wade Duck in Garfield and Friends.
  • Grandma Walton played the head of a fraud and car theft ring in "Barney's First Car".
  • Gene Reynolds directed three episodes. Reynolds is best known as co-creator and co-executive producer of Lou Grant.
  • Theodore J. Flicker also directed three episodes. Flicker is best known for co-creating Barney Miller.
  • Sam Bobrick wrote 19 episodes. Bobrick is best known for creating Saved by the Bell.
  • Arnold Margolin wrote five episodes. Margolin is best known as co-composer and lyricist for the theme song to Love, American Style.
  • James L. Brooks wrote two episodes.
  • Earl Barret also wrote two episodes. Barret is best known as co-developer and co-executive producer of Too Close for Comfort.
  • Ben Starr wrote an episode. Starr is best known for co-creating Silver Spoons and co-developing The Facts of Life.
• Seasonal Rot: A pretty serious case. After Don Knotts dropped out of the show after the fifth season to pursue a film career, the series went on without him for three more years. Most fans dislike these episodes (easily recognized because they were shot in color) for being unfunny and moralistic. Without Barney to play off of (though early episodes tried to replace him with the less-well received Warren Ferguson, only for him to be dropped three-quarters of a way into Season 6), Andy loses much of what made his own character funny, and he becomes a rather solemn grump.
  • Also, the sudden addition of new neighbors in Mayberry, such as Howard Sprague and Emmett Clark, really didn't help matters much either.
  • The color episodes are so unpopular, in fact, that some channels like MeTV don't even air them, favoring the black and white episodes.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Opie's horror when he realizes that he accidentally killed a bird with his new slingshot in "Opie The Birdman".
  • Color episode "The Return of Barney Fife" includes Barney's utter heartbreak when he finds that Thelma Lou has married another man since he moved to Raleigh. Seeing Barney, plucky Barney, being utterly devastated by this revelation is equally as heartbreaking for the audience.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Mayberry in "The Stranger In Town" for how they treated Mr Sawyer. Andy scolds them for not welcoming him. They were understandably creeped out by a man who knew way too much about them. While the man had a sympathetic enough backstory, he had no family and had heard about Mayberry from an old war buddy and thought it would be a great place to live, if he had just told them that to begin with rather than acclimating himself right away, they would've welcomed him. Andy outright tells Mr. Sawyer this and he's proven right when the town immediately changes their tune when the truth comes out, yet the town was still portrayed as wrong for it.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The episode "Alcohol and Old Lace" involves two sisters selling moonshine and justifying their crime because "we're not like those other moonshiners, they sell liquor for drinking purposes; our elixir is for special occasions." Naturally, the town's drinkers are making up excuses to take a nip. One particular scene involves a man pretending to be a Muslim celebrating Mohammed's birthday. It's not necessarily a scene that couldn't work today, but it's hard to imagine any show after The War on Terror - barring maybe an Animated Shock Comedy - dropping such a scene in so casually.
  • The Running Gag of Barney being careless with his gun and having to keep a single bullet in his pocket for emergencies loses much of its humour in the face of repeat questionable shootings by police officers.
  • One episode has Andy giving a young boy a gun to hold. While there are no bullets in the chamber and Andy does stress the importance of gun safety, a scene like that would never be shown on modern TV.
  • One episode involved Opie being bullied. When Andy found out about this, he refused to contact the bullies' parents or school about it because he wanted Opie to learn to stand up for himself, later telling Opie a story about how he was bullied as a child and how when he stood up for himself the bully ended up backing down. The episode ends with Opie apparently beating the bully up. This is pretty much the opposite of how bullying victims are encouraged to deal with their problems today.
  • In "Opie Finds a Baby", Opie's friend Arnold thinks the abandoned baby they find is a boy because of its blue blanket. Today, blue and pink aren't as gender-specific as they used to be, so it's not necessarily true that a baby is a boy because their blanket is blue.
  • There's a clip from the end of "Opie and the Spoiled Kid" involving the titular spoiled kid raising a fuss after Andy confiscated his bike for riding on the sidewalk. His temper tantrum gets more and more out of control, culminating in the boy's father promising to sell the bike and the boy being taken out to the woodshed for an implied spanking. The clip gets passed around YouTube and social media among proponents of spanking, but these days, the prevailing opinion is that you can't make up for your poor parenting by beating it out of your child.
  • The uproar over Opie having a quarter in "Mr. McBeevee" strikes modern viewers as just plain weird today. But in the sixties, large pockets of rural America of the sort Mayberry is supposed to represent were still recovering from the Great Depression. With the national economy shifting to manufacture and industry during/after World War II, agricultural communities took decades longer for their local economies to recover (some still haven't even today). Thus, in a time and place where every penny means a lot to its bearer, Opie having a quarter he can't adequately account for and Andy and Aunt Bee's suspicions of its origins make a lot more sense.
• Values Resonance:
  • A clip of Andy erasing a recording Opie made of a conversation of a suspect and his lawyer made in secret while defending the right to privacy and attorney-client privilege has been making the rounds on YouTube ever since the revelations of the NSA's spying program.
  • Andy's concern on trying to afford a college education for Opie still holds true to modern parents. Even those with well paying jobs will find college very expensive.
  • As a counterpoint to Barney's clumsiness, Andy rarely ever carries a gun on duty, wanting to be respected by the citizens of Mayberry more than feared. As such, it synchronizes surprisingly well with today's issues with police shootings and subsequent calls for police to be better trained in conflict resolution.