Andy Griffith Couldn’t Get A Job After Mayberry

After Don Knotts left The Andy Griffith Show, the comedy was never the same. The genial sitcom was as popular as ever — it finished #1 in the ratings in its eighth and final season — but the awards and pop-culture buzz were going to shows like The Monkees and Laugh-In. Griffith was ready to be done with the 30-episode-a-year grind, and he had a good exit strategy: A five-year, ten-picture deal with Universal, according to the biography Andy and Don. He was ready to become a movie star.

“I thought I was going to be hot stuff,” he told PEOPLE in 1986, per Remind Magazine. “Instead, I sat around the house for several years.”

That 10-picture film yielded only one film, 1969’s preacher comedy Angel in My Pocket. Universal went into panic mode before the movie was even released, now unconvinced that Griffith could carry a movie on his own. For a follow-up, the studio wanted Griffith to reunite with Knotts for a comedy called Me and My Shadow. Griffith told his agent he wanted out of the deal, and he was done after one movie. Angel in My Pocket got “it’s good enough” reviews, but didn’t do much at the box office. 

By the end of the 1960s, “Andy Griffith’s telephone wasn’t ringing,” according to Andy and Don. “I’m not a fisherman, I’m not a carpenter, I’m not a hunter. There was nothing to do,” Griffith told the Chicago Tribune. “I am emotionally not a person who can be unemployed.”

The movie offers never came after Griffith killed his Universal deal. Unhappy without a job and wanting to prove he could do more than comedy, Griffith agreed to return to television as the boss of a small private school in the drama Headmaster. CBS wanted comedy, but Griffith planned to make Henry Fonda-style speeches about the war in Vietnam. “We’re gonna try and deal with many of the situations that young people come up against these days,” he promised.

The preachy show bombed and was gone by midseason, replaced by The New Andy Griffith Show, a mild comedy about “a kindly authority figure in a small town.” The New York Times called it “a situation without a comedy.” By the end of the year, Griffith had been canceled twice. 

The 1970s were a challenging time for Griffith, who starred in a series of failed TV shows. One dud was Salvage 1, in which he played a junkman selling technology scraps left on the moon. Griffith finally got back on his feet in the 1980s with the one-two punch of a made-for-TV Mayberry reunion and the affable attorney Matlock. 

No wonder he looked back fondly on his 1960s success while making that Andy Griffith Show reunion movie: “Those were the best years of my life.”