Andy Griffith Appreciated, Lots Of Other Stuff Touched Upon

“In Mayberry, Thelma Lou didn’t put a cigarette out on Barney’s arm like my girlfriend did to on mine; Andy Taylor wasn’t embittered or slump-shouldered after a lifetime of ridicule by those with more social status; no Beasley beat his wife half to death with a shoe. Still, Mayberry was a believable universe without these things. Tools of television helped make this true — camera angles, lighting, a disciplined laugh track, extras so far in the background they are almost invisible, along with other aspects I’ve mentioned. But there is one thing about the story that has not been discussed, and it is the thing that gives it gravitas, and why I, and others, watched. Opie’s mother is dead, unaccountably, before the show begins — it’s what sets the fiction in motion. Aunt Bee arrives to keep Opie from growing up wild and sullen — to keep the home from falling apart. The show offers humor as a way to contend with a constant state of grief.”
 — Awl pal Evan Smith Rakoff writes about Andy Griffith and North Carolina and Edward R. Murrow and Thomas Wolfe and Danny Thomas and Robert Burns and the Emmys and the Oscars and folk music and television and a Neutral-Milk-Hotelly band called Radiator Hospital and small-town American life and tourism and classism and I can almost guarantee that if you read it you will learn some interesting things that you didn’t know before you did.