“Bonanza” and “Gunsmoke” - other much-loved staples of that era in our household - would occasionally take a crack at edgier storylines involving race or gender. Our conversation slipped into reminiscences of all the all-white shows we have known, and whether we are better off with showrunners pretending that people of color didn’t exist. (“I didn’t miss too many episodes, Shani-o.”) Opie suddenly found himself conflicted! Football or piano? My dad remembered this storyline clearly. Opie then met the cool new football coach who was a black ex-NFL player. Aunt Bee was into it, but Andy wasn’t too keen.
Only one black actor - Rockne Tarkington - ever had a speaking role on “The Andy Griffith Show.” The story went like this: Opie was starting piano lessons. They didn’t give themselves the opportunity. And so on.īut even more than that was this: “They didn’t come across as being racist,” my dad said. Andy tries to help the church buy a new organ. You know the plot lines even if you haven’t seen it: Opie finds a wallet with $50. Firm morals + a wacky situation x a dash of Don Knotts being ridiculous = just good clean fun.
The simplicity of the storylines remains a huge part of the appeal, my dad said. A good soul who wanted to elevate those around him.” What he told me was this: “I never looked at Andy as being too good for the others - I looked at him as being a stabilizer. To be nostalgic for it is forgetting that Mayberry was based on a town where Griffith grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and where he was called “white trash.” To be nostalgic for it is missing the point.
#MAYBERRY ANDY GRIFFITH SERIES#
People are nostalgic for Mayberry, but Andy spent most of the series (after the early years when his character was a silly hayseed) trying to improve it. What I told her was that Sheriff Andy Taylor was better than Mayberry and that’s the thing people don’t get. As Brooke said, it was mostly the “good old boys” who still clung to the ideals of Mayberry. And as we all know - we all know this, right? - a “simpler time” is shorthand for a time when white people didn’t have to think about whether they were treating nonwhite people (or women) like humans. In her world, and in many worlds, Mayberry is shorthand for a simpler time. We shared our sadness over Andy’s death on gchat, and then she asked me what I got out of “The Andy Griffith Show” when I watched it as a kid. My friend Brooke is a progressive Southern white woman from a tiny town in Georgia. Because anyone with a television could have watched it yesterday. We can all say that we were just watching “The Andy Griffith Show” yesterday. And it felt like a long time from when I would spend afternoons watching the show with him in the 90s.Īnd he was quiet for a minute and he cleared the sleep from his voice and he said, “Oh man.” And I said, “Yeah, man.” And he said, “I was just watching ‘The Andy Griffith Show’ yesterday.” Tuesday was a long time from when my dad watched “The Andy Griffith Show” in the 60s. It is a long way from me, and a long way from where he grew up, in a haphazardly built house in all-black Slate Hill, in Roanoke, Virginia. He is three hours behind me, and was just waking up in a suburban tract home located in the largest city in American history to ever file for bankruptcy. When the news of Andy Griffith’s death was confirmed, I called my dad.