Late actor Andy Griffith famously played Mayberry’s kind sheriff, Andy Taylor, in the beloved series The Andy Griffith Show, which had an eight-season run until 1968.
MeTV.com reported that Griffith shared that his moral character’s lack of faults made it a bit difficult to write episodes centered around Sheriff Taylor.
“Andy Taylor was such a good man. But you know, until about the last year, we could not write shows that were about Andy. Because Andy was too good,” said Griffith during a Knight-Ridder interview, per MeTV.com. “You have to have a weakness somewhere in order to write a show for you. There has to be a flaw. And Andy was a good man. If you look back on all those shows, they were never about Andy. While I was in every show, in almost every scene, it wasn’t about me. It was always about one of the other characters.”
Andy Griffith Explained He Immediately Knew Don Knotts’ Deputy Barney Fife Needed to Be The Show’s Main Comedic Character
Griffith, who died in 2012 at the age of 86, made similar comments about Sheriff Taylor in an interview for Pioneers of Television. He said that his character was originally “supposed to be funny and tell little funny stories about the people in Mayberry.” However, he said after Don Knotts joined the cast, Griffith knew his character, Deputy Barney Fife, needed to be the show’s main comedic character.
“I remember thinking somewhere in my mind, ‘This man should play comedy. And I should play straight for him.’ I knew that the second episode, and so I kept saying after that, ‘Let’s give more to Don,'” said Griffith during the interview.
He then noted that Sheriff Taylor eventually “became the center [of the show] because [he] became the straight man for everybody.”
“Also we could do shows that didn’t have comedy in them. We could do shows that were just straight stories,” added the late actor.