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Mayberry’s Color Line: Color TV and the Integration of Andy Griffith — Sage Perspectives Blog [1]
['Maria Pia Tissot']
Date: 2024-02
The limits of a white liberal and assimilationist narrative, which reward appropriate stances towards capitalism and by extension American democracy, only extend so far in “Aunt Bee’s Restaurant.” Even as Mayberry’s residents are delighted by the new Chinese Restaurant, which functions as an assertion of their tolerance for difference, Chinese American characters are only integrated into the imagined white town as long as they remain tethered to the stereotypical space of the restaurant. The episode’s consistent othering of Chinese American characters, elevates their difference in a way that is palpable and distinct from the colorblind world Flip Conroy enters a few weeks later. Here the use of color—Flip’s grey sweatshirt, light brown suit, and khaki pants—functions to visually integrate him into the white world of Mayberry. In clear contrast to Charlie, Conroy’s presence helps create domestic harmony (literally, he plays the piano) in the Taylor home. In “Opie’s Piano Lesson” race is never even mentioned, even as it remains the organizing factor of this imagined colorblind white rural South.
While Andy Griffith’s initial run ended 54 years ago, it’s a show whose popularity was and remains astounding, especially for a Civil-Rights era show about a white Southern sheriff. From 1960 to 1968, the sitcom was top-ranked in the Nielsen reports, its final season it was the highest-ranked show on television, and it ran in syndication for decades after, producing multiple spin-offs. Today, the town of Mt. Airy (Griffith’s hometown) continues to celebrate “Mayberry Days,” a “festival for the whole family with activities and events for the fans who long for the days when life was simple and the sheriff didn't carry a gun.” In the many afterlives of Andy Griffith, the series’ transition to color and the treatment of Charlie and Flip Conroy provides a lens through which to see how anxieties about race, difference, and integration served as a fundamental and organizing forces of network-era primetime television. That Andy Griffith still circulates takes these historical conversations into our contemporary moment, providing an opportunity to look critically at nostalgic narratives of a simple past.
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[1] Url:
https://perspectivesblog.sagepub.com/blog/research/mayberrys-color-line-color-tv-and-the-integration-of-andy-griffith
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