{"id":211,"date":"2012-07-09T18:57:26","date_gmt":"2012-07-09T18:57:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=211"},"modified":"2015-04-30T15:30:51","modified_gmt":"2015-04-30T15:30:51","slug":"the-andy-griffith-show-classic-black-sitcom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=211","title":{"rendered":"“The Andy Griffith Show” — Classic Black Sitcom?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is one of the more peculiar anomalies of American popular culture. Black people, by and large, LOVED The Andy Griffith Show<\/em>! Judging only from the tweets, postings and random comments I\u2019ve been hearing from African Americans since the show\u2019s star passed away last week, their devotion to the series persists to this day despite the fact that throughout its eight-year run not one African American had a speaking part on the show.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And we\u2019re not talking about any eight-year period in American history. This was 1960 through 1968, the flashpoint years of the civil rights movement when southern towns more or less resembling Mayberry were stages for some of the bitterest, most violent struggles for racial equality. The southern sheriffs frequently seen on nightly network newscasts during those years were nowhere near as kindly, wise and reasonable as Andy Taylor. I\u2019ve no doubt there was those who thought those distinguished Alabamans, Eugene \u201cBull\u201d Connor and Jim Clark, were, at rock bottom, decent, professional law enforcers who had the misfortune of being caught on the Wrong Side of History. But that\u2019s not what most folks remember about them now.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One waited for the wave of revisionism borne by that movement\u2019s legislative and cultural transformations to render The Andy Griffith Show\u2019s<\/em> wistful depiction of a bucolic, integration-free southern town as anachronistic camp (at best). If anything, the show became even more widely beloved and cherished in Rerun Heaven. African Americans didn\u2019t seem interested in even retroactive picketing against the show\u2019s obvious blank spaces \u2013 though said spaces were in the intervening years gleefully, even wickedly mocked by such artists as Drew and Josh Alan Friedman whose two-page comic strip parody <\/a>of the Griffith show had the whole town of Mayberry lynching a hapless black motorist unlucky enough to have driven into Gomer Pyle\u2019s service station. (\u201cSuddenly Aunt Bee strikes!\u201d was the legend on a panel in which the best cook in town applies a rolling pin upside the nameless negro\u2019s cranium.)
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This raggedly funny short <\/a>does the same thing with actual clips from the show while this keenly observed piece <\/a>challenges the presumption that there were no black people whatsoever in Mayberry, N.C. (I did say no \u201cspeaking part,\u201d didn\u2019t I? Let me check. Yes, I did.)
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So how come The Andy Griffith Show<\/em> gets a free pass from the black community for benign neglect even as shows as varied as Downton Abbey<\/em> and Girls<\/em> get hammered these days on social networking sites for having no black characters in their respective storylines?
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Here\u2019s a theory. Maybe not mine alone, but I\u2019ll heave it onto the floor and let people stare at it:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The laid-back \u2013 how to put this \u2013 southern-ness of the Mayberry vibe is something that everyone with roots to the region can relate to, Black, White or Other. And even with those aforementioned blank spaces where black actors should have been, there was something funky, occasionally spicy about the show\u2019s comfort food to make me wonder whether The Andy Griffith Show<\/em> could plausibly be considered a precursor to the black family sitcoms that would start coming in waves in the 1970s. I\u2019ll even go so far as to proclaim this show as the pre-post-civil-rights-era-black-family-situation-comedy.<\/p>\n

Yes, I know. But as knotty and awkward as this definition sounds, I bet I\u2019ve got at least a couple of witnesses out there who know what I\u2019m saying here. I keep waiting for a kind of negative-image version of Mayberry to surface on TBS; maybe with Tyler Perry as the wise, kindly and widowed sheriff of a predominantly black working-class town in, say, central Florida. I\u2019ll bet you the national debt that you could cast black faces in every other role in that town and you wouldn\u2019t have to write new scripts \u2013 or a new theme song.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is one of the more peculiar anomalies of American popular culture. Black people, by and large, LOVED The Andy Griffith Show! Judging only from the tweets, postings and random comments I\u2019ve been hearing from African Americans since the show\u2019s star passed away last week, their devotion to the series persists to this day despite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[368],"tags":[17,18,20,21,19],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tv-reviews","tag-andy-griffith","tag-drew-and-josh-alan-friedman","tag-mayberry","tag-n-c","tag-tyler-perry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":215,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions\/215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}