Best movie of this year hands down!

Thanks for the memories!

Pretty Good

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Andy Griffith made an end to his TV show but the citizens of Mayberry still had a couple of years of life left in them with Mayberry, RFD.Sheriff Andy Taylor and school teacher Helen Crump married and moved away from Mayberry. To give the new show a central character Ken Berry fresh from F Troop plays Sam Jones, a farmer just elected to the Mayberry town council is brought in. He's a widower like Andy Taylor was and raising a small son Buddy Foster. He even hires Aunt Bea to be his housekeeper now that Frances Bavier no longer had to keep house for Andy and Opie.All the other Mayberry regulars and semi-regulars were retained and the show did well for two seasons. But at that point CBS pulled all its rural based shows to get a different market. And at that point those Mayberry characters like Paul Hartman, George Lindsey, Jack Dodson etc. all went to television Valhalla.Sad the show ran into CBS's determination to get younger viewers. It's the seniors who watched this and other rural type shows and the seniors least likely to respond to advertising pitches.Other than reunion movies this ended our look into Mayberry, North Carolina.

When Andy Griffith decided to leave his own show in 1968 to focus on a movie career, the show continued on under the title Mayberry RFD. Instead of Griffith, Ken Berry, a year after F Troop ended, portrayed a similar character Sam Jones. He was also a widower with a young son, played by Buddy Foster, the brother of actress Jodie Foster. Also returning were the familiar characters of Goober, Emmett, Howard Sprague and Aunt Bee. Also returning was Arlene Golonka as Sam's love interest Millie. She brought beauty to the show. After the second season, Frances Bavier, who played Aunt bee since The Andy Griffith Show began in 1960, left the show and was replaced by Alice Ghostley as Aunt Alice. Even without Griffith and Ron Howard, Mayberry RFD didn't miss a beat and turned out to be a very popular rural sitcom. Unfortunately, with ratings still high, CBS canceled the show as part of the Rural Purge in 1971. It's a show that hasn't had a long run as Andy Griffith and it deserves to be rerun on a network such as METV. Mayberry RFD continued the tradition of wholesome, rural sitcoms and shouldn't have been canceled while it was still on top of its game.

I am about to say something that no-doubt will annoy many. While "The Andy Griffith Show" was one of the best shows in television history, after a while it really outlived its usefulness. Without Barney as a series regular, the show tried a variety of either annoying replacements (Warren!!!) or insipid ones (Howard and Emmett)--none of which gave the show the wonderful comedic balance it once had. To make matters worse, after the show limped through three mediocre such seasons, the powers that be at CBS decided to continue the show even when Andy left!!! The 'clever' plan was to introduce a widower, Sam (Ken Berry), who would move to town with his son AND apparently buy Aunt Bee! Talk about a contrived premise--and a poor copy of the original. So now without either leading man, the show was nothing but insipid characters...period. That, in a nutshell, is "Mayberry R.F.D."--like the original show but with none of the humor or interesting characters. Now this isn't to say that the show was bad--it just was bland and inoffensive and that still made it better than some shows. But who wants to live on a steady diet of bland toast--which is, metaphorically speaking, "Mayberry R.F.D.".

"Mayberry R.F.D." is basically "The Andy Griffith Show" without the key performers, the direction, the writing or the story-lines. What we are left with are city councilman Ken Berry and a sparse group of holdovers (Frances Bavier, Paul Hartman and Jack Dodson). Surprisingly the public did not seem to care as the show ran the better part of four years and completed 78 episodes. By the late-1960s "The Andy Griffith Show" had become stale though (even Griffith admitted to this) and losses like Don Knotts, Ron Howard, Howard Morris, Denver Pyle, Betty Lynn and Hal Smith were way too much to overcome. CBS held on to the idea out of respect, good manners and consistently above-average ratings, but the writing had been on the wall for quite some time when "Mayberry R.F.D." went the way of the dodo in 1971. Personally, I think this detracts from the original program and I have ended up dismissing it. But that is just me. 2 stars out of 5.