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Andy Griffith took the blame for the failure of his series ''Headmaster''
Audiences, and Griffith himself, weren't ready for the radical departure.
In Hollywood, you're only as good as your last project. So, when Andy Griffith left television at the end of the '60s, few were as "good" as the former Sheriff of Mayberry. When The Andy Griffith Show aired its final episode, Griffith was the undisputed heavyweight champion of the TV world. Few, if any, could boast a more impressive track record of ratings and critical approval.
It must've been quite the shock, then, when Griffith wasn't immediately able to recapture his earlier success.
Following a lackluster movie deal, Griffith attempted to re-enter weekly television. According to a 1971 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer, Griffith thought he could "keep [his] old fans and add some younger ones" by making a show that combined comedy and "relevant" drama. The resulting series, Headmaster, had plenty of drama, but most of it happened off-camera and was due to audiences being entirely underwhelmed with the show.
The first episode didn't land anywhere near the Top Ten in the important Nielsen ratings. The show quickly plummeted to #48.
True to his old character though, the former Sherrif Taylor took all the responsibility for the series' failure. Griffith didn't lay the blame on the producers or his new castmates. Instead, he looked at his work and the way he'd fumbled expectations.
"I wanted to try something different, I thought we could do it, but long before the static from CBS started I knew we were in trouble.
"I tried my departure, playing Hamlet, and I fell on my butt. I'm not sorry I tried, but I wish we could have known it was a failure in time to replace ourselves in November, instead of January."
Audiences, according to Griffith, just weren't ready to see him experiment with a character that was different from the one he played on The Andy Griffith Show.
"If you're typed a certain way, that's it. I look the same, I sound the same. All I can do is what I do. I was different in a movie, A Face in the Crowd. My grandmother said, 'Andy I wish you wouldn't be mean'— but that wasn't Hamlet. It wasn't that far from my own background.
"I felt uncomfortable, out of my bag, playing a school teacher, though I used to be one. The first day of the second show, when I sat down on the couch in the headmaster's house, I felt a physical reaction. I was really nervous, as if I was a kid again in my professor's house and unprepared. I was always uneasy in school— grammar school, high school, college. Whenever I went to class I felt I wanted to die; I always wanted to get behind someone tall. There wasn't a prayer that I'd stand at the front."
While the show was a far cry from a success, Griffith didn't regret his exercise in experimentation.
"But I think mainly I'll just hang in there with comedy. Noy many know how to do comedy, and if a man can do comedy and doesn't, he's a fool."
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