If you have a hankering to head back to Mayberry, you’re in luck. Currently, all eight seasons of the beloved sitcom The Andy Griffith Show are streaming for free on Prime Video. The series follows the widowed sheriff Andy Taylor (Andy Griffith) and his trails and tribulations raising his young son Opie (Ron Howard) in the small fictional town of Mayberry, North Carolina. One of the most prolific shows in television’s history, The Andy Griffith Show won six Primetime Emmy Awards over the course of its run from 1960 to 1968, was a star-making role for Griffith, and launched the now six-decade career of Ron Howard — the juggernaut director behind Willow, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Solo: A Star Wars Story, to name a few.
The character of Andy Taylor was inspired by Griffith’s real-life rural roots in Mount Airy, North Carolina. Already an established actor at the time, Griffith had mastered both stand-up comedy as well as drama as the lead in the prescient 1957 film A Face in the Crowd. Eager to try his hand at television, Griffith debuted the character of Andy Taylor, originally a well-meaning country bumpkin on The Danny Thomas Show. Griffith was such a hit that network CBS and their sponsor General Foods committed to the spinoff Andy Griffith Show immediately.
Over the course of the show’s successful run (it never placed lower than seventh in the Nielsen ratings in its eight years on air) Griffith developed Andy Taylor into the show’s straight man and the residents of Mayberry’s trusted counselor and mediator. It allowed the supporting cast of characters like Deputy Barney Fife (the legendary Don Knotts), and Andy’s family like his Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier) and Opie to be the source of the show’s episode-long dilemmas and subsequent laughs. In many ways, Griffith became one of the early prototypes of “America’s Dad” with his portrayal of Sheriff Taylor. Even when it was on the air, the creatives behind The Andy Griffith Show sought for the program to harken back to “a simpler time” than the massive sociopolitical upheaval of the sixties with the heartfelt bucolic community of Mayberry.
57 years since it went off air, The Andy Griffith Show endures for the same reason. Last year, on the podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend“, Howard cited that the focus on character and authenticity by Griffith and the show’s producers was what differentiated the Andy Griffith from its competitors at the time, and made it the long-lasting favorite it is.
“They were always stressing character,” Howard, now a two-time Oscar winner, revealed. “And Andy used to kill jokes if they were if they were too broad and and he just kept saying, ‘The South is plenty funny on its own’, without having to reach for it and do slapstick and stuff.”
According to Howard, another key aspect of the show’s lasting success was its commitment to Griffith’s perspective. “It was so much a function of a kind of singular creative voice, not that,” he told O’Brien. “Andy…didn’t have a producer credit, but it was his show. It was tailored to his sensibility.”
In an age where so much media is “made by committee”, The Andy Griffith Show is a welcome, and likely much-needed reminder of not only “simpler times” but of what makes great storytelling.
All eight seasons of The Andy Griffith Show are currently streaming on Prime Video.
