Let's face it: Mayberry could use a few more people like Andy Taylor. He's honest, dependable, levelheaded and always willing to do the right thing. But even the best of us have our limits. And as it turns out, Andy Taylor was almost too good for his own television show.

Despite sharing a name and a face with the beloved sheriff, Andy Griffith insisted that the idea he was simply playing himself on The Andy Griffith Show was "nonsense," according to an interview with The Charlotte Observer.

Griffith also understood that making Andy Taylor so morally upright came with a bit of a problem: The character wasn't always the easiest to write.

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While viewers loved watching Andy keep Mayberry's residents out of trouble, there wasn't always much trouble for him to get into himself. As Griffith explained, the show's stories usually revolved around the antics of the people around Andy rather than his own personal struggles.

And that was no accident.

"Andy Taylor was such a good man," Griffith said. "But you know, until about the last year of the show, we could not write shows that were about Andy. Because Andy was too good."

"You have to have a weakness somewhere in order to write a show for you," Griffith continued. "There has to be a flaw. And Andy was a good man. If you look back on all those shows, they were never about Andy. While I was in every show, in almost every scene, it was always about one of the other characters."

Griffith often played the straight man to Mayberry's more eccentric residents. In fact, he recalled that director Bob Sweeney once described the town as "a normal small town, but it has a border of insanity around it."

With a town full of characters like Barney Fife and Ernest T. Bass, Mayberry needed someone to keep the peace. Thankfully, Andy was up to the job.