Andy Griffith said The Golden Girls was one of the only sitcoms he watched in the Nineties
From Mayberry to Miami!
If anyone knew sitcoms, it was Andy Griffith. From his guest appearance on The Danny Thomas Show which spun off to his own massively successful sitcom The Andy Griffith Show to his later mega-hit Matlock, no one could deny that Griffith was a sitcom expert.
He'd also been in the industry long enough to see the landscape of TV shift.
"Oh, it changed enormously," Griffith said in an interview with the Archive of American Television, "and the main change is when I was doing the Griffith Show, the network was only your host. The sponsor bought that whole half hour. General Foods had that whole half hour, and we only had General Foods to answer to. We never had anything to answer to with the network. They came down once a year to say hello."
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*available in most MeTV markets"Then prices got to where they sell by the second on network television," Griffith continued. "Then the network gained control... it was so easy in the early days. Just Sheldon [Leonard, Andy Griffith Show producer] and Aaron [Ruben, producer] and me and Don [Knotts]."
By the Nineties, when the interview was filmed, Griffith said that he didn't watch "hardly any situation comedy now. Seinfeld and The Golden Girls. That's about it."
He simply didn't think the others were funny any more. According to Griffith, the large in-studio audiences encouraged actors to play it up with huge takes instead of reacting more down-to-earth. Even Don Knotts, his old friend, had to be coached to pull back his reactions on camera during his guest role on Matlock.
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