Mayberry’s Color Line: Color TV and the Integration of Andy Griffith
By Dr. Phoebe Bronstein
In 1965, Andy Griffith (1960-1968) premiered in color, becoming one of CBS’ earliest shows to do so (Susan Murray, Bright Signals). The episodes that follow this transition stretch the limits of Mayberry’s fictional white world, integrating (on a few occasions) characters of color. For instance, in “Aunt Bee’s Restaurant” (1967), Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier) opens a Chinese restaurant in Mayberry with a Chinese American partner, Charlie (Keye Luke) and his nephew Jack (Lloyd Kino). A month later, in “Opie’s Piano Lesson” (1967), Rockne Tarkington, playing former NFL star Flip Conroy, becomes the first Black character to appear in a speaking role on Andy Griffith. Here, I look briefly at the use of color in “Aunt Bee’s Restaurant” and how it frames the underlying raced and gendered politics of Mayberry’s white Southern fictional world.
The palette of white Mayberry is decidedly neutral. Brown, blue, green, and gray frame many of the shots of the town’s prime locations from Andy’s house to the jail and even Opie’s (Ron Howard) classroom. Fitting distinctly into this world, characters like Aunt Bee and Andy’s (Andy Griffith) love interest Helen (Aneta Corsaut) often wear blues and whites, matching them with the décor, suggesting a comfort and harmony between characters and place. Over multiple episodes, this color palette is normalized and collapsed with their whiteness.
By contrast, the space of the new Chinese restaurant bursts with deep reds. Red lions, red paper lanterns, and red costuming to evoke stereotypical Chinese representations. Even in the Taylor home, when characters speak of Charlie and/or the restaurant, red appears via props like a lamp or a sewing kit. This color scheme reinforces both Charlie and the restaurant’s otherness; Charlie’s red glasses further equate him with this space, marked as exotic and different from the white space of the Taylor home. Ultimately, the Chinese American characters—and the emblematic red—create discord in the Taylor home that is only eased when Bee decides to leave the restaurant business (her decision governed by having received an ominous fortune in a fortune cookie). The episode thus positions Charlie, to borrow a term from Cindy E-Feng Cheng, as a “foreigner within,” where he functions as a “welcome immigrant,” who yet remains permanently marked as different and foreign (quote from Melissa Phruksachart’s “The Asian American Next Door”).
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.
Article Details
Southern Projections: Black Television Hosts, Madison Avenue, and Nationalizing the South in 1950s Primetime
Phoebe Bronstein
First Published December 20, 2020
DOI: 10.1177/1527476420980099
Television & New Media
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