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Andy Griffith was against adding this character to the show
He disagreed over a technical detail.
What would the town of Mayberry be without its coloful array of residents? Who could forget the musical Darlings, the good-hearted Gomer, or Floyd the barber? There's no doubt that the citizens of Mayberry are just as important to the charm of The Andy Griffith Show as Andy, Opie, or Barney.
However, there's one resident that Andy was against adding from the beginning.
It led to "the only fight" that Griffith and show creator Sheldon Leonard ever had in their working relationship. "He wanted to introduce a character that I knew wasn't going to work," Griffith said. "And it didn't."
The character that led to their only fight? The mayor of Mayberry!
"They wanted me to have a boss figure," Griffith said. "They wanted to introduce a mayor as a boss figure."
Griffith agreed that "it's a good idea for the lead to have a boss figure." So why was he so against the addition of the mayor? It came down to a flaw in realism.
"I told them before we started, 'That can't work because the mayor cannot be the boss to the sheriff.' A sheriff is a county official. A mayor is just a little local town official. So, it didn't work."
Andy Griffith Show fans know that in the end Leonard got his way and Mayor Pike joined the cast of Mayberry. After Dick Elliott's death in 1961, he was replaced by Parley Baer as Mayor Stoner.
Then after season three's "Rafe Hollister Sings", the mayor was never seen again. So maybe Andy got the last word in this character debate after all.
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30 Comments
Well, it helps being the person who's supposed to look for missing persons if you want someone to go missing.
Luckily, both were also rather expendable characters, so obviously, the show really didn't lose much of anything when we saw the last of either character.
