And there are no guffaws here, for no matter how much humanity we think Griffith and Frances Bavier and Ron Howard manage to instill in their characters, or how much we appreciate their relationships, they’re not primed for humor, just warmth. (More on this below.) Otherwise, the story of a widower raising a kid with help from his aunt is a very traditional low-concept premise and, unless tailored for a multi-cam that’s beholden to making a live audience laugh (like The Danny Thomas Show, which also had a season of widowerhood), it’s not a format built for guffaws. With the sitcom, as a genre, in a slump at the end of the 1950s, putting a “wrinkle” in the usual formats was especially attractive, and as we’ve seen, many of the domestic comedies of 1960 sought to reach a more cosmopolitan audience by making suburbia seem “sophisticated.” This vehicle for Andy Griffith - a country singer and comic best known to viewers for his performances in the films A Face In The Crowd and No Time For Sergeants, the latter of which he also appeared in on Broadway, where, in 1960, he was just coming out of the musical version of the classic western Destry Rides Again - takes exactly the opposite tack, as a matter of sincerity, and sets its family up in a more rural environment. However, I have to be fair and note that the show doesn’t want to be a riot - on the contrary, at the heart of its design is one of those evolved nuclear family setups that aims for gentleness, humanity, and warmth over laugh-out-loud comedy. We’ve since called these “warmedies,” and there was a wave of them in the ’60s - including two popular hits by Don Fedderson - even though this trend began back in the late ’50s, when the networks sought to put a wrinkle on the typical domestic formula by altering the family unit in some way, usually by substituting mom or dad with an outside parental figure. For starters, the show isn’t on the top shelf for humor - there are more hahas in an offering of early ’60s classics like Dick Van Dyke, not to mention the upcoming rural efforts by Paul Henning, than in Andy Griffith, and because any sitcom’s primary obligation is to make us laugh, this is a serious remark. But before we get to highlighting said gems, I have to go briefly into why the show is important in our big-picture look at the genre, and I’ll frame this discussion by explaining the criticisms I’ve leveled above via the elements of the series’ identity that define its main values. For Andy Griffith is one of the most important ’60s sitcoms and the best of its type - the era’s most amusing warmedy with a modified nuclear family structure and a workplace buddy component that enables one of the finest comic performances of the decade (Don Knotts), all within an appealing small-town Americana package - and, unlike Beaver, there really ARE a healthy output of half-hour gems that make the series worthy of the kind of coverage we do here. Rather, it’s best to let the focus of these posts stay on the chosen episodes. I can’t in terms of seasonal analysis, I’m not interested in dissecting the series too granularly because I know it wouldn’t increase my appreciation. It’s not as funny, as consistent, or as character-driven as the best TV comedies we’ve featured, and because its maintained popularity has given most of us inflated ideas to the contrary, I wish I could pretend otherwise. But much like Leave It To Beaver, in the context of this blog, I don’t consider it a crowning piece of study. It’s a sitcom classic around which I have many happy after-school memories. The Andy Griffith Show stars ANDY GRIFFITH, DON KNOTTS, RON HOWARD, and FRANCES BAVIER. Welcome to a new Sitcom Tuesday! This week, we’re starting coverage on the best of The Andy Griffith Show (1960-1968, CBS), which is currently available in full on DVD and Amazon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |