Introduction

ANDY TAYLOR and Barney Fife could make the world stand still. Stretching out on the front porch of Andy’s Mayberry home, Andy and Barney would reel off hypnotic meditations on the mundanities of life. Their conversations defied the frenetic pulse of their medium, network television. For millions of viewers, The Andy Griffith Show was a sanctuary in a nervous world, with two friends at its center, reclining on a porch.

“Ya know what I think I’m gonna do?” Barney tells Andy in one moment of Mayberry Zen, as Andy strums a guitar. “I’m gonna go home, have me a little nap, then go over to Thelma Lou’s and watch a little TV.” Several seconds pass in silence. “Yeah, I believe that’s what I’ll do: go home, have a nap, head over to Thelma Lou’s for TV.” More silence. “Yep, that’s the plan: ride home, a little nap . . .”

The Andy Griffith Show endures like no other artifact of television’s golden era. In the fifty-five years since its October 1960 debut, Andy Griffith has never left the air. At the dawn of 2015, Griffith episodes air several times a day, watched by a fan club with more than one thousand chapters and celebrated in an annual festival that draws thirty thousand fans to a real-life Mayberry. To fully appreciate this program’s staying power, even by comparison to other television classics, try to find a Honeymooners convention.

The Griffith Show tapped the talents of its era’s finest television producers, writers, and directors—along with an unparalleled ensemble of actors, a cast that included not only Don and Andy but also future Hollywood powerbroker Ron Howard and the multitalented Jim Nabors. But the program’s undeniable quality does not fully explain its longevity.

There is something iconic, something quintessentially American, about The Andy Griffith Show. The program appeared at a moment of dramatic flux in American society. People were leaving farms for factories and towns for cities. The civil rights movement was waxing, and antiwar protests were coming. It was a time of assassinations, electrified music, and slackening standards on sex and drugs. Yet, the Griffith Show refused to embrace those changes, or even to acknowledge them. Instead, the program trained its gaze backward, revisiting and reviving the rural Americana of the 1930s, the time of Andy’s childhood in North Carolina, and Don’s in West Virginia. The Griffith Show helped viewers recall a simpler time, helped them reconnect with their own past, at a moment when Americans desperately needed the reminder. As Technicolor chaos swirled around them, millions of viewers embraced the black-and-white tranquility of the Griffith Show and held on tight.

The Griffith Show would showcase television’s most tender friendship: “Ange,” affable sheriff of the rural hamlet called Mayberry, and “Barn,” his jumpy deputy. Andy was a gentle parody of a country lawman, fighting crime in a town that had none, protecting a citizenry that was palpably safe. Barney was a parody of Andy, bug-eyed, childlike, and diminutive. Andy protected Barney from the outside world, holding its bitter realities at bay, just as he protected Mayberry itself, its denizens and its homespun traditions.

Sheriff Taylor’s fatherly bond with Deputy Fife emanated from real life; it was the foundation of their friendship. Their personalities meshed. Andy was dominant; Don was submissive. Andy was big and loud, ribald and wild, quite the opposite of the sage sheriff. Don was gaunt and quiet, restrained and reserved, a sharp contrast to the manic deputy. They shared a past. Both had known stark poverty: Andy’s first bed was a bureau drawer, Don’s a cot in the kitchen. They grew up on the same diet of radio—Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, The Lone Ranger—and amid cinema’s golden age. Both men embraced entertainment as an identity as they approached manhood. Both rode their talents as far as their local arts scene would take them. Both men came to New York and bombed, retreated to the South, then returned to take Manhattan by sheer force of talent and will.

Above all, Andy and Don shared a transcendent sense of whimsy, a particular way of looking at the world. The same Southern peccadilloes cracked them up: old men ruminating for hours about buying a bottle of pop. Daddy asking the tailor to throw in an extra pair of socks with that new suit. An uncle slapping a “five spot” into your palm with great fanfare. Old ladies fussing about the pickle contest at the county fair. Dressing up to dine at the Eye-talian restaurant with the fancy checkered tablecloths.

Like any friendship worthy of study, theirs was complicated. Andy sacrificed his own comedic talent to play Don’s straight man. This selfless act would reap enormous profits for Andy as half owner of the Griffith Show. Don, by contrast, left Griffith after five years with far less money in his pocket and little financial stake in its future.

Both men recognized the strength of their pairing. Neither would reach the same comedic heights alone. Yet, Andy refused Don’s offer of partnership beyond the Griffith Show. Andy wanted to stand on his own feet. Years later, when Andy finally found success again with the courtroom drama Matlock and his ego recovered, he finally, magnanimously, offered a part to Don, who was himself struggling for work, and the partnership was briefly rekindled.

Neither man’s story can be told alone. Andy was a master entertainer and an occasionally brilliant dramatic actor. Don was a comedic great, his oeuvre a sort of missing link between the celebrated eras of Jerry Lewis and Woody Allen. Yet, like all the best comedy teams, Andy and Don were better together than apart. Their best work invokes Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy. Every time they sat down to write, the results were timeless.