Utopia, North Carolina

Mayberry embodied most of the idealism, and none of the ugliness, of the 1960s.

The Andy Griffith Show, "Opie the Birdman"
OB:  September 30, 1963, 9:30 p.m. EST, CBS
I was born three months after this episode aired.

The Andy Griffith Show, "Aunt Bee the Crusader"
OB: January 20, 1964, 9:30 p.m. EST, CBS
I was six days old when this episode first aired.

"You know what I think I'll do?...I think I'll go down to the fillin' station, get me a bottle of pop, go home and take a nap, go over to Thelma Lou's and watch a little TV...That's what I'm going to do, down to the fillin' station, get a bottle of pop, home, take a nap, then go over to Thelma Lou's and watch a little TV. You sure you don' t feel like a bottle of pop, Ange?"
"No."
"Well, I do. That's what I'm going to do. Go down to the fillin' station to get me a bottle of pop, home, nap, down to Thelma Lou's..."
"Watch a little TV?"
"Yeah."

I put off writing this one as long as I could. This isn't just any TV show, not even just any classic TV show. I wanted this to be just right. I wanted to take my time, and I wanted it to be written carefully. Maybe I got there, maybe I didn't.

And there's a reason for that. The Andy Griffith Show happens to be my favorite TV show of all time.

It was important to me to give the two inner selves of mine who are helping me write this blog--the critic and the fanboy--a chance to duke it out amongst themselves before they settled down and agreed to work together. It was important to me to make sure everyone knew I approached every show with an open mind, and didn't want anyone to think any show I described in the posts after this one, to be afterthoughts.

And you should know one more thing: my list of my favorite, say, 20 TV shows of all time cuts across all eras and decades and genres, and range from I Love Lucy to Breaking Bad. I love and admire them all very much.

But they all take a back seat in the '63 Ford Galaxie squad car to that warm, comforting, idealistic, character-driven, beautifully acted, lovingly crafted eight-year love song to America's small towns.

Opie: Johnny Paul says, if you put a horsehair in stagnation water, it'll turn into a snake.

I can't remember the first time I ever saw The Andy Griffith Show, but I do remember the show was still on CBS at the time.  I remember it being in daytime as well as nighttime, and I seem to remember it being in color--that's right, in a perverse fluke of timing, I got to know Howard Sprague before I ever met Barney Fife. I remember the first time I ever heard the name "General Foods," it was because the company sponsored this show, and I still think of this show whenever I see the Post cereals logo. And I heard the name "Mayberry" before I even fully understood the name of the real life small town where I grew up (Glencoe, Alabama). So all of this to say, the citizens of Mayberry go back as far with me as my own family and only a handful of my closest friends.

Gomer: Goober says hey.
Andy: Hey to Goober.

Like I said, I grew up in a small town myself...but it surely wasn't a Mayberry. Granted, Glencoe was and is, full of wonderful people who'd do anything in the world for you, but it also had a four-lane federal highway running right through the middle of it (and another one slicing through a far corner) and it's attached to a larger city, Gadsden, our much closer version of Mount Pilot. So it doesn't have the isolation or the quietness, or the town square for that matter, of a Mayberry. In fact, I always suspected Mayberry was meant to reflect small towns that were bypassed by the new, and still under construction, interstate highway system of the 1960s. And that would've suited the citizens of Mayberry just fine.

In fact, the town of Mayberry seemed like a character unto itself; it, and the overall series, each had their own personalities. The personality of Mayberry never changed; the personality of the show changed constantly. Although it was supposedly founded in the 1860s, Mayberry was created for our purposes at a time when Southern small towns could've used all the public relations they could get: they started to get a reputation as either a place where civil rights workers mysteriously disappeared, or more commonly, a place where you'd be more likely than not to get pulled over. (The latter is actually how we meet Sheriff Andy Taylor for the first time, in fact.) The show was very likely modeled after Andy Griffith's real life hometown of Mount Airy, North Carolina; although he denied that fact for years, later in life he started hinting maybe there was considerable truth to it after all. "Boy, it sure seems that way, doesn't it?" Griffith once said, winking, as the Andy Griffith Playhouse in that city was being dedicated. Griffith may have also modeled it after a few other towns in that area as well, including one that often shows up on maps as "Mulberry."

Those memories, obviously, are honed by nostalgia and idealism, Griffith's version of a perfect small town, mostly free of the political division that gripped so much of America in the 1960s. The result was very, very little sign of the outside world of that era. One of the most obvious exceptions was the squad car in which Andy and Barney patrolled the streets.  It was always a brand new Ford, and ironically a reminder in itself as to why it was necessary, since so many of the crooks they arrested (who weren't moonshiners) were people just passing through from that very outside world.

Barney Fife: If only there was a crime, just one crime! If only someone would just kill somebody...
Andy Taylor: Barney!!
Barney Fife: Well, it wouldn't have to be anyone we know... If two strangers was to come to town, and if one of them was gonna kill the other one anyway, they might as well do it here...

Born June 1, 1926--the same day, interestingly enough, as Marilyn Monroe--Andy Griffith grew up in Mount Airy's blue collar section. In high school he studied drama and music, taking up the trombone (which he played in at least two classic episodes). He also landed parts in the annual play "The Lost Colony," eventually working his way up to the plum role of Sir Walter Raleigh. At the University of North Carolina he changed his major to music (he was actually going to be a preacher) and taught music and drama at a high school in Goldsboro. Griffith became a standup comedian, with one of his routines, "What it Was, Was Football," actually becoming popular on the radio and in record stores. The routine is based on a premise that would seem to be unheard of in the BCS era: a Southern hick who has never heard of football, wandering into a well-attended college game where they're "fighting over a funny looking pumpkin." Five years later, it was part of a comedy album that paved the way for those of Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby and others, that redefined the genre.

Griffith made his TV debut on The Toast of the Town (as The Ed Sullivan Show was still known in those days) in January 1954, and just a few months later appeared on The Colgate Comedy Hour, in a show in which Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were the headliners. In 1955 he appeared in a play that made its world premiere on The U.S. Steel Hour, "No Time for Sergeants." He played country bumpkin Will Stockdale, who's drafted into the Air Force and makes fools out of the veteran military men around him. It's a role he'd repeat on Broadway and memorably, on film--but first, his 1957 movie debut in Elia Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd." Although it was financially unsuccessful at the time of its release, Griffith's role as Lonesome Rhodes, a guitar-playing drifter who becomes an Arthur Godfrey-style TV superstar with heavy political influence, is prescient and almost scary to watch now: Griffith, trying method acting for apparently the only time in his life, embraces his dark side. It's quite possibly his all time greatest acting performance, one that some felt should've gotten an Oscar, but Griffith hated what method acting did to him (he often remained in his dark character even during breaks in filming). And so, an alternate pop culture history in which we might've thought of Andy Griffith the same way we think of, say, Marlon Brando and James Dean, simply never happened.

His next film was more typical, an adaptation of "No Time for Sergeants." It was a smash hit, and had the distinction of uniting Griffith with Don Knotts. In a single scene, Knotts plays an Air Force psychologist who tries to get Will Stockdale to take a mind game-type test (he has to link two big metal rings), which Will does before the psychologist even finishes explaining it. It freaks out Knotts' character, and thus one of the greatest comedy teams in history was born.

By the time 1960 rolled around, Griffith had now established himself in yet another Broadway production--"Destry Rides Again"--and was a hot property, so CBS and Danny Thomas gave him a plum shot: a "backdoor pilot" on the February 15, 1960 episode of The Danny Thomas Show. It almost didn't happen: when Griffith saw Danny Thomas screaming at his writers, he suddenly got cold feet and told producer Sheldon Leonard he didn't know if he could do it. Leonard (who played Nick the bartender in the movie "It's a Wonderful Life," one of several connections Mayberry would have to Bedford Falls) simply put his hands on Griffith's shoulders and said, "Andy. It's Danny's show and Danny just likes to scream. Everyone here knows it. This will be your show. If you don't want anyone to scream, no one's going to scream."

The Arthur Standler-penned episode takes a direct shot right off the bat at the Southern stereotype of the ticket trap: Danny Williams (Thomas' regular character) and his family get pulled over in their Ford Thunderbird convertible, for running a stop sign that was simply set on a roadside with no intersection in sight. Sheriff Taylor, in his world premiere as a TV character, explains the county could only afford the sign and was still saving up to build the road. When Danny demands to speak to the justice of the peace...that also turns out to be Andy Taylor, leading Danny to question whether he can get a fair trial. "Wow, that's quite a roll you've got there," Andy smiles and says as Williams pulls out a large amount of cash to pay his fine. Sure enough, the fines mount and Danny ends up behind bars.

During the half hour we only see two Mayberry characters played by the same actors, the other one being rising young child star Ronny Howard as Sheriff Taylor's son Opie. (Their scene together comes right out and says what's only implied in the series: that Opie's mom died before he was old enough to remember her.) Frances Bavier appears, only this time not as Aunt Bee. Will Wright plays the shady owner of a suit store (and would play the crabby department store owner, Ben Weaver, on the series), while the town drunk is a different character played by Frank Cady (Green Acres). Most importantly, it's a glimpse at an alternate Mayberry, one in which Griffith plays a hickish but ultimately country-wise sheriff. And this is likely what the show would've looked like, almost a one-joke show, really...had it not been for a phone call the next day.

Don Knotts called to congratulate Andy on the show, apparently it already being obvious that CBS would pick it up for a series. But the call was about two fortunes possibly headed in opposite directions: Knotts was suddenly unemployed. For years, he had been a regular on The Steve Allen Show (on which Griffith himself appeared very frequently), and NBC had just announced it would pull the plug on the Allen show at the end of the season. So Knotts swallowed his pride and asked, "You wouldn't need a deputy, would you?" It was a simple question that would change television history; Griffith, having already been told he would have enough influence not to allow screaming on his show, saw to it Don Knotts had a job as a deputy in the Mayberry courthouse.

Born and raised in West Virginia, Knotts started off in show business as a ventriloquist. He gave up the idea while touring as part of a Special Forces team in the Army in World War II; years later one friend recalled Knotts just threw the dummy off of a troop ship into the ocean, and even mimicked its fading cries for help. After the war, Knotts finished his college studies at West Virginia University before moving to New York and getting jobs in radio, including Windy Wails, the comic-relief character on the kids' western, Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders. On television his first role, improbably enough, was a surprisingly serious one: he played a hysterical mute who would only talk to his sister, on the daytime soap Search for Tomorrow. Knotts eventually made a name for himself as one of Steve Allen's "man on the street" regulars (along with Tom Poston and Louis Nye), usually playing a trembling, nervous character.

Knotts taking on on the role of Deputy Barney Fife--it was written just for him, no one else was ever considered--changed the show completely. By the second episode, "The Manhunt" (in which a hickish Andy was still playing with a state police commander's chart magnets), it became obvious Knotts was going to be even funnier than Griffith, so Griffith should function as more of a straight man. And so, Barney Fife became an icon of over-confident, code-quoting, small-town cops who thought they were saving the world, one jaywalking ticket at a time.

If no cop in America wanted to be called "Barney Fife," the opposite is true of his supervisor: I've known a surprising number of real-life Alabama sheriffs who've embraced Sheriff Andy Taylor as a role model. Where Barney Fife always wanted to find trouble, Andy wanted to avoid it and make it go away. He felt he was there for the townspeople, not for the crooks. Andy prided himself, for instance, on rarely carrying a gun, once saying, "When a man carries a gun all the time, the respect he thinks he's getting might really be fear. So I don't carry a gun because I don't want the people of Mayberry to fear a gun. I'd rather they respect me." (The real reason: Griffith just didn't like how it felt on his hip. Somehow, that explanation just fits perfectly.)

The show evolved as a stew of various pieces of inspiration: Griffith's own upbringing, and his own beliefs in religion and human nature; inspiration from small-town-skewing old radio shows--the dialogue inspired by Vic 'n' Sade, and a similar setting to The Great Gildersleeve (whose characters even included a barber named Floyd); and even TV westerns. Andy's and Barney's relationship may have been modeled after Matt Dillon and Chester Goode on Gunsmoke; Andy's single-father relationship with Opie, possibly molded after the one Lucas had with his son Mark on The Rifleman. (Single parents were just then beginning to make inroads into television at that point; that same year, 1960, Fred MacMurray would also start playing one on My Three Sons.)

The show, and  Mayberry, tried to appeal to as many of our senses as possible. It visually looked like a comforting city where almost anyone would feel welcome and where everything you needed was almost always within walking distance. The sound was laced with a lot of music--Andy was often seen strumming his guitar on the porch at the end of the day, and there were guest appearances by the much-sought-after bluegrass band, the Dillards, who appeared as the Darling Boys. (There was a folk music revival going on in the country at the time, so that's probably why all the guitars. Sure enough, they often sang folk songs, like Pete Seeger's "Tom Dooley.") Even our sense of taste wasn't ignored, as food was also a big part of the show, whether it was fried chicken prepared by Aunt Bee or meatloaf served at the diner, or perhaps even the cashew fudge snacked on by Barney and Thelma Lou while they were watching that doctor show on TV. Food was so important, in fact, that years later a best-selling cookbook was made out of many of the dishes mentioned on the show.

Each little change in the show affected its, and Andy Taylor's, personality. Barney Fife being a breakout character helped push Andy away from his hickish character to a wiser, mature lawman, as did his season-long relationship with the very liberated lady pharmacist, Ellie Walker (Elinor Donahue). As she left and we got to know a lot of other characters (and Andy would date a few more women before finding permanent girlfriend Helen Crump, a school teacher--again, just like The Rifleman), the show arguably became the first sitcom to evolve into an ensemble piece. Its sharp writing emphasized character; Griffith, who was involved in every script and was even known to improvise entire scenes with Knotts (the famous bit about Barney buying a septic tank for his parents' anniversary was actually one of those, as was the above running joke about getting a bottle of pop), had a rule that "If it sounds like a joke, throw it out!" An alternate to that was, "If it sounds like a joke, at least have the characters treat it as one." "He should go sit in the market, so everyone will know he's the big cheese!" Barney once said of an especially arrogant character. Andy laughed and told him that was "a good one, big cheese," making Barney appear very proud of himself.

In fact, side by side with The Dick Van Dyke Show which shared producers, The Andy Griffith Show helped revolutionize character humor, doing it for single-camera shows the way Van Dyke did it for those shot in front of a studio audience. Maybe you came because the small town atmosphere made you comfortable; the high quality of the acting and writing would definitely make you stay.

Barney (to two cells full of prisoners): Now here at the Rock we have two basic rules. Memorize them until you can say them in your sleep. The first rule is, obey all rules. The second rule is, no writing on the walls, as it is very difficult for us to get back there and remove writing from walls.

And the quality was married to an unforgettable atmosphere, the sum of its unique characters--a town barber who was a big fan of Calvin Coolidge, a town drunk who arrested himself so he could sleep one off in the town jail; a mortician who also repaired televisions and used a hearse as his repair vehicle; a friend of Aunt Bee's who prided herself on her award-winning pickles...and a whole town full of people who looked out for one another no matter what, even if it meant conspiring to save someone's feelings. "Keeping the peace" in Mayberry meant two old men getting into their weekly argument after a checkers game going bad, Aunt Bee casually cooking an excellent meal with tons of leftovers for whoever wanted them (and that included prisoners); Barney locking himself in a jail cell again, far away from the keys; or Gomer giving an entire speech about how water and air are free but Wally's Service would go broke if the same were true about gasoline. And it always meant church and prayer, clearly written from personal experience with details right down to Andy filling out an offering envelope.

A pair of season two episodes epitomize this wonderfully unique idea of looking out for one another: in one of them, they're trying to keep Aunt Bee from finding out her canned pickles suck, even though she plans to enter them in the county fair; in another, it's to keep Barney from finding out the same about his singing voice, even though he just landed a solo in the choir. In yet another, when an overzealous Barney is left in charge and arrests a large percentage of the town for minor infractions--that includes Aunt Bee, Opie, the mayor, the president of the bank, etc.--and becomes a laughing stock, Andy lets it slip Barney will have to be fired for losing respect of the town. As a result, everyone locks themselves up again.

Although the series' 1960 debut episode, "The New Housekeeper," introduced Aunt Bee to the Taylor household, a better introduction to the series might well be the season three episode, "Man in a Hurry," about a businessman whose Lincoln Continental breaks down en route to an important business trip. But he finds himself stranded in a small town with no way to get his car fixed quickly and enslaved to the town's slow, leisurely pace, and its Sunday afternoon tradition of letting two elderly sisters use the party telephone line for a few hours, even if all they have to talk about is their feet falling asleep.

Mr. Tucker: You people are living in another world! This is the 20th Century, don't you realize that? The whole world is living in a desperate space age!  Men are orbiting the earth! International television has been developed! And here--a whoooole town is standing still because two old women's feet fall asleep!
Barney: I wonder what causes that?

The show's ensemble cast, like the townspeople, all worked together for the common good, and you rarely heard behind-the-scenes incidents involving people who didn't get along with each other. Of course, I didn't say "never," I said "rarely"...because there was at least one exception.
If you ever hear any behind-the-scenes "dirt" about the show, there's a better than even chance Frances Bavier, who played the otherwise beloved Aunt Bee, was in the middle of it. It's often mentioned that she considered a small-town sitcom to be "beneath" the classically-trained Broadway actress. "There's just something about me that woman just never liked," Griffith himself once said. She once, famously, blew up at Howard Morris while he was directing a scene (Morris played Ernest T. Bass on the show but also directed a few episodes). A TV Guide article from the week of January 11-17, 1964, explores her loneliness, suggesting the studio set of the Taylor home may have been more of a "home" for her at that point than the actual Hollywood home where she went every night. It also quotes her as saying "I've had to take a backseat and watch others get the laughs, and it hasn't been easy," on being upstaged by Don Knotts and then-child-actor Ronny Howard. The article says because of that relegated role, she was "in analysis" (this was a time when stars were only beginning to admit they saw counselors) and it made her philosophical. Eventually her retirement from acting would be even lonelier and more bizarre.

It's often stated she resented the role of Aunt Bee, but it was actually one of the more fascinating on the show. I suspect she eventually came to peace with it; she supposedly apologized to Griffith while on her deathbed in 1989, and her tombstone actually mentions the name "Aunt Bee" and includes the inscription "To live in the hearts of those left behind...is not to die." Over the course of the series, we actually see her evolve and become more liberated. In the premiere episode she's left thinking she can't do anything right after she and Opie get off on the wrong foot. Eventually we see her win prizes on a national TV game show; buy a car and learn to drive; run unsuccessfully for city council; travel to Mexico; put on a blonde wig and experiment with reinventing herself; co-own a Chinese restaurant; date a congressman, and even take flying lessons and go on a solo airplane flight. Some of that helped Bavier win an Emmy in season seven.

If you want to see Aunt Bee as a protest march organizer (and an angry-sounding Bavier the way most of the cast probably knew her), look no further than the first episode of my lifetime, "Aunt Bee the Crusader." It was directed by Coby Ruskin and written by John Whedon...who has family you may've heard of.

The guest star in this episode is one of those people we've seen in everything from I Love Lucy to L.A. Law, Charles Lane. He also appeared in the movies of Frank Capra, including as the rent collector in "It's a Wonderful Life." He often played villains and snippy bureaucrats; while interviewing him once, David Letterman once described his stock characters as "look who's coming, guess we're going to lose the farm now." Only in this episode, Lane plays Mr. Frisby, the egg farmer (we used to have someone like him deliver eggs to our house too, back in the 1960s), and it's his turn to lose the farm.

He chooses to break this to Opie and Aunt Bee by bearing gifts: Opie gets Mr. Frisby's prize rooster, Beau, and he gives Aunt Bee a moustache cup. Then he uses this occasion to break the news: he has to get out of the butter-and-egg business because "They're running me off my property." He says he's being evicted from "the land I was born on, and my father before me," to extend the highway.  "Sheriff's got his orders, nothing he can do about it, got a job to do." Aunt Bee decides to see about that.

Back at the courthouse, Andy and Barney go through their ritual of letting sober-again Otis (Hal Smith--character actor, cartoon voice man, Los Angeles kids' show host and real-life teetotaler) out of his cell. Barney takes his usual failed crack at trying to get Otis to reveal where he's getting his illegal liquor. Mayberry was a dry county so Otis likely got it from moonshiners. (Obviously the show's attitude toward substance abuse is a tiny bit outdated; a surprising number of 1960s sitcoms had "drunk characters." On Bewitched it was the guy played by Dick Wilson; on Car 54, Where are You? the guy was played by Larry Storch.) Barney tries giving Otis the "third degree," once again using "sophisticated crime-stopping methods" he most likely got off the late, late movie. The first attempt ends with Otis breathing his morning alcohol breath in Barney's face; the second ends when Barney tries to shine the office desk lamp in his face, only to break the neck and having the lamp keep dropping over.

"Otis, you didn't let it happen again, did you?" Aunt Bee asks as she comes into the courthouse. "Oh no ma'am, at least I tried not to...I seen temptation coming and it seen me coming too." Aunt Bee tells Otis she prayed for him and suggests he talk to Reverent Tucker. "Poor Otis, and he tries so hard," she says just after Otis leaves, to which Andy responds, "I wouldn't say he strains himself."

Aunt Bee then jumps Andy's case for not working harder to go after the moonshiners selling Otis the alcohol, and picking on "decent folks" like "that darling Mr. Frisby."

Barney: That's the county for you, extend a highway that already goes no place!
Andy: They ran out of money!
Barney: They ran out of brains!
Andy: They've got the money now, and the reason they want to extend it--
Barney: If you ask me, they ought to fire the whole lot of them, a bunch of dead heads and goldbrickers, the whole lot of 'em!
Andy: Barney, did it ever occur to you that we're county employees?

No, of course it didn't.
As Aunt Bee and Andy debate what's going on, Barney takes the side of whoever spoke last, repeating "They need that highway!" and "Why don't they put it someplace else?" until Aunt Bee snaps, "Oh Barney, will you stay out of it?" (I have to wonder how much of Aunt Bee's dialogue was inspired by what Bavier may have said on the set.) When Andy tries to explain that Frisby will be well paid for his land and can move wherever else he wants, Bee says some things might be more imporant than money, "...things like home, and people's feelings, and where they grew up, and things like, do unto others!" When Andy says there's nothing he can do, Aunt Bee suggests he not hang out at jails so much and go to church more often, then storms out the door. I love how the nastiest, most hurtful thing you can do to someone in Mayberry when you're mad at them...is to judge them, being judgmental being akin to anger and meanness.

Barney: Wouldn't hurt Ange, maybe if you went to church more often--
Andy: Will you shut up?

Andy's not through with this yet, unfortunately. He comes home and finds Opie building a coop for his rooster, and Opie then tells him about the moustache cup; "I guess it's to keep mustaches in." Andy confronts Aunt Bee on the porch, telling her Frisby is just playing on hers and Opie's sympathies. Aunt Bee says it's something Andy is "doing to him,:" but Andy says everything's done by due process of the law. "Due process my foot! It's one poor old man against the county, what can he do? And you stand there talking about the law, no justice, no feelings, just do what the law says! Whatever side your bread's buttered on!" Fans of the show believe each episode has a "life lesson"; this is actually a study in political philosophy, in which Andy and Aunt Bee come right out and admit they're debating the old question, "Are we a nation of laws or a nation of men? Can the good of the one outweigh the good of the many?" Andy represents the law and tries to insist everything is done fairly; Aunt Bee takes everything personally and lashes out on behalf of one man who has her sympathies.

"Are you telling me how to do the job of sheriff?" Andy asks. "Well, somebody should!" Aunt Bee shouts as she storms through a screen door, her second such dramatic flourish in a second consecutive scene. For the next few minutes the two talk to each other through Opie--supper's on the table, she'll have hers in the kitchen, Andy's not hungry, suit himself, ending with Andy saying "I don't care what you tell her!" and Opie shouting through the screen door, "He doesn't care what I tell you!" This one makes me laugh out loud and recalls the older Ron Howard I would see on Happy Days.

The next day Barney chats with Andy about this at his breakfast table, where Andy mentions the gifts and the argument.

Barney: We could get him on a 204...bribery, collusion, tampering with and/or intimidation of material witnesses.
Andy: That's a 204?
Barney: Kind of a catchall.

They drive up to the courthouse and find a good ol' 1960s protest with signs and everything. Andy goes into the courthouse and still tries to argue with the protesters--he never gives up trying to persuade, never gives up trying to explain himself to everyone, never says "Because I said so and that's all you need to know." No wonder real Southern sheriffs still like him so much. As he goes in, Barney tries to get the protesters to disband.

"You all heard the sheriff. Now you all put on a real nice demonstration here, and I think you should all go home now and lay down and rest." This gets a reaction from the crowd, so Barney reminds them they're "congregating unlawfully," a favorite phrase he likes to throw around, but they say they have their rights too.

"You heard what the sheriff said, now we can't have some minority here--"
"Minority?" Aunt Bee and the crowd screech almost in unison as they descend on a horrifically terrified Barney, who never takes his eyes off of them as he gets into the courthouse.

Barney tells Andy this is a "real situation" they have on their hands, but Andy says he's not worried. "Men you can slap in jail, but women, what can you do with women?" Barney asks.  Barney says Andy should've seen how they were coming after him, holding up his claws and going, "Nyeah! Nyeah!"
"How did they come at you?"
"Nyeah! Nyeah!" Barney repeats, holding up "claws" again, in a scene that never fails to crack me up.

Andy: I ain't worried about it, I think you can take Aunt Bee!
Barney: Huh?
Andy: She's got a mean left jab and some fancy footwork but I still think you can beat her!
Barney: You're funny, you are as funny as a crutch!

After getting the call that the bulldozers are ready at Frisby's property, Andy and Barney show up in the squad car to find Aunt Bee and the rest of the protesters, joining Mr. Frisby in front of his farmhouse, singing "We Shall Not Be Moved." Opie meets his pa at the squad car. Turns out Aunt Bee can throw a surprisingly spirited protest rally.

Andy yells for the crowd to calm down; they do just in time to hear Barney yell his trademark "Nip it! Nip it!" Andy tells Mr. Frisby it's now time for him to move on, but the crowd starts chanting "Stand your ground! Stand your ground!" and "Move us too! Move us too!" Andy quietens the crowd again and jumps Barney for chanting along with them. "Barney will you stop hollering with those women?"(Barney isn't used to having to choose sides in Mayberry.) The crowd boos as Andy orders Barney to clear out the livestock and tells Opie to help him. When the two get to the chicken coop, Opie starts saying "Here chickie chickie chickie!" to coax them out. "To heck with that!" Barney shouts, as he storms in and tries to order and boss around the chickens, only to run back out when they start attacking him.

As the furniture is being moved out, Opie runs up to his father with Beau, the rooster Opie had earlier been ordered to give back to Mr. Frisby. He's concerned that Beau is sick and even dying, he stumbles around a lot in a way suggesting a real-life animal wrangler was using fishing line. (I hope he was being treated humanely.)  Andy, noting the chicken has a case of the "blind staggers," asks Opie where he got him, and Opie surprises him with the news there's a cellar with a trap door under the henhouse. Andy asks Barney to do anything to stall the women while he checks out the henhouse. Barney tells them "how much we appreciate this fine turnout," then pathetically (and hilariously) tries to lead them unsuccessfully in "Row Row Row Your Boat," suggesting they sing in sections. They respond by chanting "We will not sing, we will not sing!" and Barney starts "conducting" them.

Then Andy shows up with a still, saying "Ladies, what am I bid for this fine old antique? I'd like to tell you it's one of a kind, but there's five more down there just like it." Andy explains they were with the incubators, and with the egg business being down, Mr. Frisby apparently needed a sideline and "You women were about to help him keep one going." So naturally, Aunt Bee and the rest of the crowd abruptly turn on the farmer, prompting Andy, being an obligated lawman, to say "Well, I reckon we need to go save Mr. Frisby."

So the episode answers its question with, "We are a nation of laws," and in the epilogue, Aunt Bee has to eat some crow and apologize to Andy. This episode may have taken that side, but the series itself could change its mind. In another episode, when Andy is up on charges over ineptly running his sheriff's office, it's Barney who saves the day, in one of Don Knotts' rare and finest dramatic moments, telling a hearing, "Sometimes you don't go by the book, as much as by the heart."

As a big fan of the show, I find something to love about every single episode, even the much criticized ones from the color years. (I mean come on...episodes directed by James L. Brooks? Guest appearances by Jack Nicholson, with Aunt Bee calling him "such a sweet man"? What's not to love?) Even some of my least favorite, and some of the series' most disliked episodes (like the one in which Barney returns to town and finds out his girlfriend, Thelma Lou, married someone else), have at least something that's redeemable. But most fans believe the show's black and white era--the first five seasons, when Don Knotts was a regular--are the show's creative height. Even then, it can even be winnowed further to seasons two through four, and I was born halfway through season four.

And a number of those season four episodes are beloved classics: "The Haunted House," as explored by Andy, Barney and Gomer; "The Sermon for Today" is about how a church sermon inspires an ill-fated attempt to spontaneously plan an evening band concert; "A Black Day for Mayberry" is the one about the gold truck (if you've ever wanted to see the Mayberry squad car get into a dramatic high speed chase, this is the one you're looking for); "Citizen's Arrest" is about Gomer doing just that to Barney, who made a U-turn in the squad car;  "A Date for Gomer," which turns out to be Thelma Lou's cousin Mary Grace; "Barney's Sidecar," arguably the show's funniest episode as Barney becomes a motorcycle cop and unites the entire town against him; "My Fair Ernest T. Bass," about the disastrous attempt to introduce the titular hillbilly to high society; "The Fun Girls" which not only bring back fun-loving Daphne and Skippy but also introduces us to Goober; and the season finale, the backdoor spinoff pilot for Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.


Barney:You know something I found out? If you ride into the wind with your mouth open, and you put your tongue up on the roof of your mouth, it's impossible to pronounce a word that starts with the letter S.
Andy: You didn't let anybody see you riding around on that thing with your mouth open?

And there's one more that often gets ranked on Top 100 Episode of All Time lists, both Andy Griffith's and Ron Howard's personal favorite and one that often rivals "Man in a Hurry" as the episode most loved by fans: "Opie the Birdman." Like all of the series' season premiere episodes, it was centered around Opie; in fact the whole episode only has four human characters.

Before he was a teenager on another show that would reach #1, Happy Days, and before becoming a wealthy, Oscar-winning movie mogul, Ron Howard was Ronny, one of the best, most soulful and most well-adjusted child actors working in television and movies. He was part of an acting family--father Rance was a character actor, brother Clint landed his fair share of roles, including a regular spot on Gentle Ben and even the non-speaking Leon on this show. "Opie the Birdman" could very well be one of his finest performances ever.

The episode begins like all the others: with one of the great openings in history, a whistled theme song (by its composer, Earle Hagen) that calls Andy and Opie to the fishing hole where they're headed, and the rest of us to join them for another time and place (or really, state of mind). It's the very definition of escape and it sets the mood, making us feel wistful and safe. Most TV themes announce; this one invites.

The episode itself opens with Opie and Barney in the Mayberry Courthouse; Opie has a new slingshot, and Barney, being the weapons expert, tells Opie all about David from the Bible and his own slingshot. ("Where did David get the innertube?" "Well he just cut up an old ti--") Barney teaches Opie a few tricks like "over the mountain," "behind the barn," "under the bridge" and the mirror shot.

And it's during the mirror bit--aiming for a wastebasket, Andy telling him to take it outside, Barney insisting he knows what he's doing--that Barney breaks the glass on the bookcase. Andy tells Opie all about David's actual slingshot--leather, and he turned himself around to fling it--before Opie goes on his way. Barney argues vehemently that they did too have vulcanized rubber in biblical times. "Leather straps was it?...Andy, if you don't know something, you should just say so, it's better than filling the boy's head up with a lot of nonsense," to which Andy responds, "Where did David get the innertube?" Barney still can't answer that one.

Opie walks happily down the street, pretending to hit fake targets as he shouts "Pow!" He then starts shooting actual trees...and suddenly, a bird falls out of one of them. "I didn't know you were a bird, honest..." "It's probably just a scratch, it'll be okay." Then, in a heartbreaking scene that shows just how good an actor Ron Howard was, Opie picks up the lifeless bird and tearfully says, "Fly away! Please fly away!" He runs into the house, upset and crying.

That night at supper, Aunt Bee explains she couldn't make the green beans Chinese style she'd planned to try; the newspaper recipe was continued on page seven and she used that one to line the garbage pail. Opie is obviously not hungry. Andy mentions Mrs. Snyder's cat is running loose and apparently killed one of their songbirds, but Aunt Bee points out Mrs. Snyder went out of town and took her cat with her. This is more than Opie can bear and he runs up to his room.

Andy confronts him in his room, and  says, "Hand it over." Opie gives him the slingshot and that's the last we see of it in this episode. "You going to give me a whipping?" asks Opie, in a time when belt whippings were often considered the answer to everything. Andy was known to do that to Opie, too, but fortunately we never had to see it happen. "No, I'm not going to give you a whipping," Andy says, walking over to open the window, revealing the singing birds. "Can you hear that? That's those young birds chirping for their mama that's never coming back. Now you just listen to that for awhile." Obviously, to a boy who's grown up without a mother of his own, that's harsh. But it's effective.

After a commercial break (wow, try selling some Sanka after that scene), we find Opie sitting on the porch, making a "breakfast" of bugs and worms. "Sounds like another recipe out of the newspaper," Andy quips. Opie then explains, "I got to thinking last night. Since their ma ain't coming back, and since it's my fault, and since just being sorry won't help, I'm going to take over and feed 'em." He introduces Andy to Winken, Blinken and Nod, and as Andy explains to Aunt Bee, "Fact is, Opie's just become a mama." And the episode has become an allegory, a beautifully written symbolic tale mirroring Opie's own upbringing by a young single father, written  (by Harvey Bullock, directed by Richard Crenna) when writers could still be influenced by literature and not just other TV shows.

We see Opie on a ladder, feeding the birds, as Barney gives him a pair of tweezers to help him out. Barney, wanting to feel important even here, relays that urban legend about how "All wild creatures shy away from anything with man's scent," and says even on African safaris, "the main rule is never to touch the food with your hands." Andy, apparently believing it as much as I do, says "That's good to know, next time I go tiger hunting I'm going to take my tweezers!" Barney shoots him that "funny as a crutch" look.

At breakfast, just as Barney joins the Taylors, they hear the sound of Mrs. Snyder's cat, apparently having returned with her own from a trip. "A cat?" Opie shouts frantically, followed by Andy, Barney and Aunt Bee completing the freakout as the first three run out of the house. The next scene finds the three birds in a cage, and Opie asking if he can bring them into the house. Barney tells them they're wild and they like the fresh air, then murmurs to Andy, "Besides, a bird in the house means there's going to be a death in the family."

As they go inside, Opie worries about the birds, and relays a belief from his friend Johnny Paul Jason that "If you touch a bird, he'll die." Barney assures him by saying birds communicate through chirping, then simulates chirps that supposedly mean "Gee, I'm feeling good," "Gee I'm feeling bad" "Here comes a cat" and "Let's fly away." "The ways of the creatures of the wild are many and wonderful," Barney concludes, with no self-awareness whatsoever. When Opie asks Andy how he'll know if he's treating the birds okay, Andy says, "Well, Winken will tell Blinken, Blinken will tell Nod, Nod will tell Barney and Barney will tell you!"

Barney responds with that look he gets whenever anyone gets his goat. He has that look a lot.

As the final scene comes up, Andy tells him it's time for the birds to fly away, and that he'd explained that time would come one day. What's especially touching about this scene, is that most of Opie's misgivings about releasing the birds have nothing to do with his missing them; he's worried he didn't prepare them enough to survive on their own. We can feel our hearts be gently grabbed when Opie opens the cage door and says, "I hope I did all the right things," then once again, "Fly away, please fly away." I can never watch this scene without getting a little misty, not even now.
Opie releases the birds one at a time, their smiles and the music showing us the success of Winken's, Blinken's and Nod's new life. Then Opie comments on how empty the cage looks now. "Yes son, it sure does," says Andy, then in a multi-level metaphor, wistfully looks up and says "But don't the trees seem nice and full?" He and his son walk back into the house to start another day of their own lives.

Mayberry, clearly, was a perfect world...or almost perfect. Even a classic has its issues. The writers, first of all, perhaps could've used a better fundamental knowledge of civics and Southern local politics; we see a lot of the town council but almost nothing of "the county" (presumably the county commission) where Andy and Barney draw their paychecks. We're led to believe in a couple of episodes, for instance, that the sheriff has voting powers on the town council, and at least once it's implied the mayor could just flat-out fire the elected sheriff.

The show had an obviously outdated view of women, though to be fair (as far back as season one, when Ellie Walker broke Mayberry's glass ceiling and ran for town council), the show also seemed to occasionally acknowledge this, asking us to perhaps accept that the men of Mayberry weren't the most progressive in the world toward women without necessarily endorsing that attitude.

Still, the show clearly had obvious diversity issues, for a series about a town where everyone looks out for one another. Black people were mostly relegated to extras in crowd scenes, like for instance, the crowd that cheered Barney after he tackled a fleeing litterbug who turned out to be a wanted bank robber. I don't blame Griffith and the producers for this so much: sure, Andy could've fought for a more diverse cast and the show could've been cancelled and forgotten as a result. Instead, the show was on CBS, the same network that offered to renew East Side, West Side if Cicely Tyson was replaced by a white actress. So I blame CBS partly, and partly the viewing public. It says a lot about the times we lived in, that the idea of black people and white people living together happily and peacefully in a small Southern town was still fiercely controversial. I have to believe Mayberry otherwise would've welcomed people of all races...and did, in the show's later years, when Opie's African-American football coach saved the day in one episode. (Mayberry also had a full-blooded Native American, and we met him in the episode "The Battle of Mayberry.")

The show lasted eight years altogether, always in the top ten and seven of those years in the top five. And despite some changes many fans believe hurt the quality of the show--the departures of Jim Nabors, Don Knotts (especially) and later, Howard McNear (Floyd the barber) changed the acting chemistry, as did the expansion of Goober's role and the arrivals of other characters like Howard Sprague and Emmett the fix-it man. The departure of several writers and producers for Gomer Pyle changed the show's tone to a much dryer form of humor. Without Barney to play off and no one to really tease, Andy Taylor seemed to become more temperamental, while Andy Griffith simply became burned out. He left in 1968, and would try to find another hit series for years. He wound through a string of flops before striking gold again in Matlock, a legal drama featuring him as a crusty Southern attorney. He actually played Ben Matlock longer than he played Andy Taylor.

The rest of Mayberry simply kept going, since The Andy Griffith Show achieved the rare feat of being the number one show on television for its entire final season, 1967-68, a feat matched only by I Love Lucy and Seinfeld. On the retitled Mayberry R.F.D., Ken Berry, as farmer Sam Jones, was now the alpha male of Mayberry, with Andy only making a few guest appearances including the series premiere (in which he marries Helen Crump).  In 1986 much of the surviving cast (minus Frances Bavier, who was ill and refused to record an audio track after quibbling over a line) got together for the TV movie "Return to Mayberry," which turned out to be the highest-rated made-for-TV movie of the entire 1985-86 season. It actually corrected some of the series' most egregious wrongs, by showing us a completely sober Otis, getting Gomer and Goober together (the two Pyle cousins only appeared together in one episode) and reuniting Barney with Thelma Lou, and letting us see their wedding. Since the original set had been bulldozed in the late 1970s (that whole lot had fallen into disrepair because the owners shortsightedly never saw the potential in tours, like the ones at Universal), a makeshift Mayberry had to be built in a California town, including a replica of the courthouse.

People who are looking for Mayberry can still find at least one part of it: Andy's and Opie's fishing trip in the opening credits was filmed in Franklin Canyon Park in California, and that spot still exists (in fact it's marked by a bench now). People also like to flock to what's believed to be the real-life Mayberry, Mount Airy, North Carolina, where I'll be headed next week in fact for my first time ever.

But no one's ever going to find a geographic Mayberry, because it's not an actual town. It's an ideal, an aspiration, a place where anyone can feel accepted and loved and not judged. The irony is, fans like myself often read our own selfish projections into it, because it's human nature to take something special and hog it for ourselves. People on all sides of the political spectrum, for instance, often assume the show is speaking just to them to the exclusion of non-like-minded people. People make a lot of the fact that Don Knotts once said he left the show by "accident," assuming it was going to leave the air after the fifth season, and signing a movie contract with Universal before hearing the show had been renewed. But what we seem to forget was that Knotts' theatrical films of the time ("The Ghost and Mr. Chicken," "The Reluctant Astronaut") were major box-office draws and likely the financial height of his career. It was probably a good move for him, if not for us.

Perhaps those of us who are fans should make that point more often--that Mayberry was clearly made to appeal to everyone who wanted in, not just a select group of people. It wasn't an exclusive club by any means, in fact there were episodes about "exclusive clubs," and the real-life Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club is just about the least exclusive club in the world. That's the whole point of Utopia: when you live in a perfect world there's enough of that perfect world to go around. (The town church was even called the "All Souls Church," making it clear Mayberry didn't favor religions or denominations.) Perhaps the show's writers and producers kept the ugliness of the 1960s--the riots, the divisiveness, racism and the violent death throes of Jim Crow laws, Vietnam, the Cold War and the nuclear arms race--swept off the streets of Mayberry, but the other part of the 1960s, the perfect-world, Kennedy-era idealism, pretty much had free reign over the place. If Mayberry was anti-anything, it was anti-tribalism. In the very end, the show fiercely believed the good of the many outweighed the good of the few, and "many" can even be defined as a small town's population.

Perhaps I should make that point more often. Then I'll go down to the filling station, get bottle of pop, then take a nap, maybe head over to Melanie's to watch a little TV. Yes, that's what I'll do...utopian idealism, get a bottle of pop, nap, maybe over to Melanie's for a little TV. Yes, sir.

Availability: the entire series is on DVD and Amazon, and Season 1 will soon be released on Blu-Ray. Netflix also has the first three seasons, and a few episodes from the rest of the series' run, available for streaming. Mayberry R.F.D. will also make its DVD debut when Season 1 is released in April.

Next time on this channel: Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre.