Shazam! Andy Still Has Appeal

My mother recently visited, which means my TV watching habits changed for a couple weeks. She is not hip to the current crop of sitcoms and dramas, thinking they’re too obsessed with, well, you know.

I happen to agree. Despite being a card-carrying Blue State soldier in the culture wars and raised in the licentious baby-boomer generation, I don’t like raunchy comedy on the telly. I haven’t discussed it with my shrink, but it may have something to do with outsiders bringing it into my home, as opposed to my going to a theater. Very disrespectful.

Still, my tastes are a bit edgier than dear old Mom’s, so we have to find things we both like. And wouldn’t you know it, that led us one night to “The Andy Griffith Show,” the 1960s classic that plays in reruns nightly on cable.

I didn’t go kicking and screaming. I’ll watch “Andy Griffith” anytime without complaint and over the years occasionally have gone on binges where I’ll watch the nightly reruns of the old shows for long stretches.

Last week, we caught the episode in which Gomer spends some time with Barney’s girlfriend Thelma Lou and inadvertently tells her that Barney thinks he has her in his hip pocket. To teach Barney a lesson, Thelma Lou acts like she’s interested in Gomer and eventually kisses him on the cheek. That makes Gomer think his gentlemanly duty is to marry her. Wow, what a mess.

What jumped right off the screen was how Gomer got all worked up because, as he told Andy, Thelma Lou kissed him “right on the jaw!” And that, when Barney and Thelma Lou finally made up, the camera showed them embrace but not kiss.

They don’t write ‘em like that on “Sex and the City.”

Mom thinks “Andy Griffith” wouldn’t fly today. I’m less sure of that but wonder whether a modern-day version wouldn’t have Gomer referring to a previous vasectomy and Thelma Lou to PMS.

I petitioned UC Irvine assistant professor Victoria Johnson for some help. She teaches film and media and believes the show does time-travel. No, the show probably won’t be slotted into prime time on CBS this fall, but she thinks the comic appeal of the show need not be limited to boomers and their parents.

Indeed, she says, her former students at the University of North Carolina revered the show. Of course, Mayberry was set in North Carolina and remains a cultural touchstone for many there.

But what about elsewhere? Would a modern society that made “Seinfeld” No. 1 and rewarded “Sex and the City” with Emmys dig Barney and Opie and Floyd the barber?

Johnson pleases me by saying it could.

“Andy Griffith, Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore,” she says, referring to the shows by their stars, “all were quieter, gentler comedies. One of the ways they hold up is that they’re not commenting on their times specifically. They’re very much out of their time and place, other than the fashions and the fact they’re in black and white, so the comedy itself holds up.”

Perhaps not in boffo ratings, she says, but as comedies appreciated for what they were. She notes that the “reunion” shows of “The Andy Griffith Show” and “The Carol Burnett Show,” for example, drew large multigenerational audiences. Besides, she says, a show like “Andy Griffith” has been available in reruns to each generation since it first aired.

I think this would please my mother, as well. I’d like Mom to believe that society isn’t rotting at the core. To that end, I’ll direct her attention to an Aug. 7 column in the New York Times in which David Brooks noted that, according to numerous empirical social indicators, Americans are becoming “more virtuous.”

He didn’t cite Andy Griffith, but perhaps I’ve stumbled onto a profound corollary to his thesis: When America no longer thinks deputy Barney Fife is funny, we can pack it in.

*

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.