Will They Deconstruct Sheriff Andy Taylor Too?

Sheriff Andy Taylor has died, rest in peace Andy. Hopefully, your unblemished ride as Mayberry’s sheriff will never be over. Unlike real life heroes, scriptwriters made you near perfect. It would be exceedingly hard to write a revisionist history of your life, filled with minor blemishes and major warts.

            In real life though, we’ve seen generations of great American leaders pilloried by pretenders insisting they write to set the record straight while really wanting to secure a major book deal. Add a lucrative movie deal while we’re at it. Knocking JFK, MLK, LBJ, FDR, and a few of the founding fathers off their high perches has brought wealth and even fame to some but at what cost? Have we as a nation truly benefitted knowing that canonization of America’s historical leaders might be too much?  
          When we were a naïve people we willingly trusted leaders to do the right thing, to insist on fair play, you know, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Saving Private Ryan. In the process perhaps we gave them something to live up to. We are cynical now. We don’t trust our leaders and it isn’t our fault. Leaders refuse to lead. They won’t make the hard choices or even discuss them honestly. And why should they? What exactly is the payoff for all that work, and bold risks, an unauthorized e-book biography? We’re pretty much on our own now.
            When Andy Griffith died many people felt a personal loss. It may be a bit hard to grasp why when so few of us have ever met the man. Who knows what he was really like as a husband, a boss, or at a cocktail party? Did he have many friends who stood by him regardless of where life took him? I suppose much of our feelings of loss relate to what his TV alter ego, Andy Taylor represented. Andy was a living, breathing example of how to live one’s life. Play by the rules, shoot straight, and be kind to one and all, an American way of life.
           Can you possibly imagine a TV studio bringing back that show, based in Mayberry with the same characters? Would the fact that so many of them weren’t married be titillating today? Andy was single. So was Barney. Thelma Lou, Gomer, Goober, Howard and Otis, the town drunk, were single. Aunt Bee was single too. I’ll bet it never crossed your mind right? I certainly never thought of it until I read Ramon Presson’s fine piece on Andy Griffith in the Charlotte Observer. Imagine the story lines today’s geniuses would conjure.
            And that got me to thinking about how polluted so-called sitcom writing is today. In the 1960s when The Andy Griffith Show was popular, the writers built their stories around the character that lay deep within each of the show’s characters. Barney may have been a meddling fool, easily duped by strangers in town, but Barney was never put in a position where he might get Thelma Lou pregnant and then have to choose between marrying her and cajoling her into terminating the pregnancy. What would today’s writers do if Sheriff Taylor discovered small time counterfeiters setting up shop in Mayberry? Would he catch them in the act, confiscate the fake bills and send them to justice?  Or, would viewers be treated to a morally ambiguous storyline where the town’s unemployed are buying some much needed goods with bogus twenties, facing deprivation if Andy shuts down the pipeline?      
           Listen: I have no interest in debating either the merits of lifestyle choices available to us today or the notion that everything is relative. I’m merely pointing out that Andy Taylor’s reputation is safe only until some addled network executives, out of real life heroes to knock down a peg, decide to go after fictional characters too.  

The Andy Griffith Show is still on almost every night because people still watch, even when they know the storylines by heart. Why? Well, I don’t know why but if I had to guess, I would say it’s because people never stop hoping that life can be the way they see it in Mayberry. In spite of countless examples to the contrary in every aspect of our lives, we stubbornly hope for a country where the generations get along, men and women respect each other, kids are safe playing kid games and above all we care about each other.

Otis locked himself in the cell to sleep off a bender. Wonder what he would see if he didn’t wake up until today?      

Copyright 2012, Len Serafino. All rights reserved.