The New Andy Griffith Show

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The New Andy Griffith Show
Genre	Sitcom
Running time	30 minutes per episode
Creator(s)	Aaron Ruben
Starring	Andy Griffith Lee Meriwether Ann Morgan Guilbert Lori Rutherford Marty McCall
Country of origin	United States
Original channel	CBS
Original run	January 8, 1971–May 21, 1971
No. of episodes	13
IMDb profile

The New Andy Griffith Show was a situation comedy broadcast in the United States by the CBS television network in 1971.

Actor Andy Griffith had left his first sitcom, The Andy Griffith Show, voluntarily after the 1967-68 season while it was still number one in the Nielsen ratings and despite a high-dollar offer from CBS to continue it, in order to pursue his other interests, singing and motion picture acting, and to prevent his being typecast solely as a rural Southern sheriff. When he decided to return to network television two years later, in the fall of 1970, it was in The Headmaster, a drama, in which he played the headmaster of an exclusive California private school. When that program very quickly sank in the ratings, Griffth replaced it immediately with this one, which was much closer in tone and content to his earlier, more successful role, and this program replaced The Headmaster on the CBS Friday night schedule effective January 8, 1971.

In The New Andy Griffth Show, Griffth played Andy Sawyer, a man from the rural Southern town of Greenwood who had left there to take a role in the state government. When he was informed that the mayor of his hometown was retiring and the town was searching for someone to fill that capacity, Sawyer agreed to leave state government and return home to become the new mayor. He was accompanied by his wife Lee (Lee Merriwether) and their two children.

Despite its greater similarity to his earlier, successful role and series, The New Andy Griffith Show was little more successful than The Headmaster had been. In fact, after first-run episodes of The New Andy Griffith Show had been exhausted (the last first-run episode airing May 21, 1971), CBS chose to rerun The Headmaster during the summer instead.