The problem with "The New Andy Griffith Show" was pretty obvious; it wasn't the OLD "Andy Griffith Show", which is what people still wanted to see. They wanted to see it so badly that at the time this show came out, "Mayberry R.F.D.", which was a pretty pale continuation/spin off/sequel or whatever you want to call it of the original show was still on, and still in the Nielsen Top 20. Another, related, problem was the continuity or lack thereof. As mentioned previously, Andy's "Mayberry" friends like Barney and Emmett came by to wish him well on being the new mayor of his hometown, so they knew him. How come they didn't see anything wrong with his name now being Andy Sawyer, not Andy Taylor, his having a different wife, Lee, rather than Helen, whom he had finally married at the end of the old show and the beginning of "R.F.D.", and that he wasn't coming home to Mayberry, where he had grown up, but to Greenwood, which was now where he had grown up? I've heard of "retrocon", but this was ridiculous. That having been said, I wonder how this show would have done had it come out five or seven years after the old one went off, rather than two, or how it would have done if it had been the first TV show ever done by Andy Griffith. (It should be noted that "The New Dick Van Dyke Show", even though it ran for three years rather than part of one, was universally regarded as vastly inferior, largely because it was impossible for it to rise consistently to the level of the old one, and not because it was truly abysmal, for it was not, and really, neither was this.)
Review of The New Andy Griffith Show
