Why Andy Griffith Struggled to Find Another Hit After Mayberry

Did you know that not all that long after The Andy Griffith Show ended, Andy Griffith did his very best to recreate his earlier success with a new, but eerily similar series? If you didn’t, don’t feel bad. Even some of the original show’s most die-hard fans don’t know about this one.

As June 1, 2026, marks what would have been Andy Griffith’s 100th birthday (he shares the same 100th birthday as Marilyn Monroe), we look back on what happened to Andy shortly after the end of his original hit series. Griffith died in 2012 at age 86.

After a couple of years away from making a weekly primetime TV series, it dawned on Griffith that leaving the highly rated Andy Griffith Show might have been a mistake. His first attempt, in the fall of 1970, was a show called Headmaster, which wasn’t much of a comedy at all.

Everett Collection

Set in an academic environment, it had a few laughs … but it was also super heavy on drama. Much like ABC’s Room 222 and later on, NBC’s Lucas Tanner, the show attempted to cover more contemporary topics pulled right from newspaper headlines. And as you might guess, TV viewers just weren’t ready for Griffith to do that type of show. The ratings weren’t good, and CBS quickly informed their star that he would need to come up with something else if he planned on staying on the air.

Griffith himself did not disagree with their decision. In a MeTV article about Headmaster, the actor is quoted as saying, “I felt uncomfortable, out of my bag, playing a school teacher, though I used to be one.”

Calling up some favors and bringing back many of the talented people that had worked with him previously on The Andy Griffith Show, Griffith returned a few months later, January 1971 to be precise, in The New Andy Griffith Show, a half-hour situation comedy that had CBS proudly proclaiming, “Andy is back”.

Not only did Griffith enlist support from behind-the-camera talent, but he also had many of the actors from The Andy Griffith Show, including Don Knotts, return and reprise their Mayberry characters during the new show’s debut episode. Apparently, Greenwood, North Carolina, wasn’t that far away from Mayberry. Ratings for the first episode were phenomenal, and for a brief moment, it looked like Griffith might have done it again.

It really seemed like the magic was back, at least for a month or so. But then it became apparent that the ratings, while not as bad as they had been with Headmaster, were nowhere near what they had been when Griffith was enforcing the law in Mayberry. By Summer 1971, CBS and Griffith had decided to part ways.

Now, if you ever get a chance to watch a little bit of The New Andy Griffith Show, which is available to watch on YouTube, you’ll see that it just wasn’t the same. Still, there were a handful of good things about the new series, not the least of which was the inclusion of the very talented Lee Meriwether as Andy Sawyer’s wife.

As stated earlier, it was all just a little too weird, and that first episode is reminiscent of that episode of Seinfeld where Elaine starts hanging around a new group of friends, only to realize that they look a lot like her old group of friends but seem just a little bit off. That’s the way The New Andy Griffith Show feels. It’s almost like The Andy Griffith Show. It looks like it for the most part, but there’s just something ever so slightly askew.

Here's What Andy Griffith REALLY Thought About Don Knotts on 'Three's Company'

The former Mayberry resident didn't mince words.

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