Andy Griffith

Never much cared for Mayberry RFD, though I recognize its place in American culture (such as it is).


Mr. Griffith was already a star, with rave reviews on Broadway in “No Time for Sergeants” and in Elia Kazan’s film “A Face in the Crowd,” when “The Andy Griffith Show” made its debut in the fall of 1960. And he delighted a later generation of television viewers in the 1980s and ’90s in the title role of the courtroom drama “Matlock.”

Andy Griffith was considerably more complex than Andy Taylor and his fellow denizens of Mayberry, although the show was based on his hometown, Mount Airy, N.C. Beginning with the lead in Elia Kazan’s film “A Face in the Crowd” in 1957, the story of a rough-hewn television personality who becomes a power-crazed megalomaniac, Mr. Griffith brought a canny authenticity to dark roles.

In the 2009 movie “Play the Game,” he played an 80-something widowed grandfather who lives in a nursing home and awkwardly jumps back into the singles game. He tries Viagra and experiences oral sex, and says the words “horny” and “erection.”

If that weren’t enough to dumbfound the old Mayberry fans, he made a commercial in 2010 extolling President Obama’s health care legislation. Republican politicians and conservative talk show hosts leapt on him mercilessly, while satirists like Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” made boisterous fun of the brouhaha. (http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-september-14-2010/mayberry-wtf)