It’s tough to think of a more universally beloved sitcom than The Andy Griffith Show. Set in Mayberry, North Carolina (a fictional version of Griffith’s real hometown), the show followed the adventures of sensible, down-home sheriff Andy Taylor (Griffith), as he raised his son Opie (future Happy Days star and mega-director Ron Howard) and sorted out the various shenanigans the townsfolk often got into — including his own goofy deputy, Barney Fife (Don Knotts).
The character of Andy Taylor was first introduced on a February 1960 episode of The Danny Thomas Show; the actual series pilot debuted on October 3, 1960. A hit from the start, The Andy Griffith Show spent all eight of its seasons among the top 10 TV shows in America, yielded multiple Emmy wins for Knotts (though none for Griffith or the show itself), and spun off the series Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. and the Andy-less Mayberry, R.F.D. Over 60 years later, it is still frequently shown in reruns, and is considered one of the greatest sitcoms of all time.
But even if you’ve logged so many hours in Mayberry that your friends call you “Floyd the Barber,” you might not know all of these facts about The Andy Griffith Show.
1. The show was created because Griffith was failing on Broadway
After beginning his career as a comedy monologist, Griffith transitioned to Broadway, where he received a Tony nomination; he then began working in Hollywood, starring in two successful films in the late ’50s: A Face in the Crowd (1957) and No Time for Sergeants (1958, alongside Don Knotts).
But as the decade wound down, Griffith felt his career was winding down, too. Which is how the seed for The Andy Griffith Show was planted. As he told Larry King in 2003, “I was in a musical called Destry. It was not doing much business. As a matter of fact, we were on what you call ‘twofers,’ that’s two tickets for one. And I went to Dave Lasfogel. He was president of Louis Mars. And I said, ‘Mr. Lasfogel, I’ve struck out in movies and theater, and I don’t want to go back to nightclubs. Maybe I better try television.’ Well, he sent Sheldon Leonard to see me, and the upshot of it was we shot our pilot on The Danny Thomas Show, and it sold. And that’s how we started.”
2. The fishin’ hole was actually in the middle of L.A.
Frances Bavier, who spent a decade playing Andy’s spinster Aunt Bee on both The Andy Griffith Show and Mayberry R.F.D., won an Emmy for her work on the show — but that didn’t mean she was easy to work with. The Broadway-trained Bavier, who also appeared in The Day the Earth Stood Still, had mixed feelings about her most famous character, remarking “I had played Aunt Bee for 10 years and it’s very, very difficult for an actress or actor to create a role and be so identified that you as a person no longer exist, and all the recognition you get is for a part that’s created on screen.”
3. That ambivalence may have contributed to what some costars said was Bavier’s frosty attitude on set. Though Mayberry R.F.D. actor Ken Berry only had nice things to say about the actress (“a very nice lady and very sweet”), Griffith did not. “There was just something about me she did not like,” Griffith once said of Bavier.
However, Bavier didn’t only have negative feelings about her most famous role; after she retired, she moved to Siler City, a North Carolina town very close to Mount Airy, the real-life Mayberry. After she passed in 1989, she was buried under a tombstone inscribed with her name … and the name “Aunt Bee.”
4 The theme song actually had lyrics
The New Andy Griffith Show was not exactly like the old Andy Griffith Show — Andy Sawyer was more folksy than Andy Taylor, he was married to Lee Meriwether, and Greenwood was many times the size of Mayberry. However, it did bear a number of similarities — not the least of which were that George Lindsay and Paul Hartman explicitly reprised their old characters on the new show; Don Knotts appeared as a nameless character who bore many, many similarities to Barney Fife.
5. Though the show’s January 1971 premiere was widely watched, declining viewership and CBS’ desire to change their image led the series to leave the air after just 10 episodes. Griffith spent the next few years making TV movies and guest appearances on shows like Hawaii Five-O and The Mod Squad, before once again finding TV superstardom in 1986, as criminal defense attorney Ben Matlock on Matlock.
