While “Mayberry R.F.D.” was the last episode that audiences saw aired on CBS, the final episode filmed of The Andy Griffith Show was the penultimate “A Girl for Goober.” This episode featured Andy, Opie, Helen, Goober, and Sam (though Aunt Bee was absent). In many ways, “A Girl for Goober” feels like a better conclusion to The Andy Griffith Show, if not just because of the way these characters (minus Aunt Bee, of course) are handled by the CBS series. Sure, it still feels more like your standard Andy Griffith hour than a series finale, but it’s a bit closer than “Mayberry R.F.G.” ever got.
In this episode, Goober is looking for love and ends up matching (via a test he took and sent back in the mail) with an intellectually fervent young woman, Dr. Edith Gibson (Nancy Malone), who is leagues beyond him. Nevertheless, he pursues her as his friends Andy and Sam already have beautiful young women by their sides, hoping he can find the same. Of course, things don’t play out the way Goober might’ve liked, and when it’s revealed that he’s not the brainiac Edith thought he was, things end shortly after. But she comes around to Goober in the end, and while we don’t expect he and this doctor are going to tie the knot, it gives him hope for his future. The last scene of the episode puts Andy, Sam, and Goober at the police station as they talk about life and love. Again, it’s not exactly a perfect conclusion for our characters, but it’s better than many of them not appearing at all, as was the case with “Mayberry R.F.D.”
According to MeTV, The Andy Griffith Show officially wrapped on February 21, 1968, with “A Girl For Goober.” That evening, the cast and crew reunited in Toluca Lake for a wrap party to celebrate their 249 episodes together. Griffith, who had already had a tough time uttering his final line filmed for the show (a question he poses to Goober at the end of the episode), didn’t have much to say to his Andy Griffith Show family. “Well, it’s been awfully good,” he told them. “It’s been the best eight years of my life. I’ll see ya again.” For a man who brought so much joy for so many years, it turns out that sometimes even Andy Griffith doesn’t have all the words to say.
Andy Griffith Returned Soon Enough in ‘Mayberry R.F.D.’
No doubt, it can be difficult to leave a group like that behind after so much time, but thankfully, Andy Griffith was onto something when he said he’d be back down the road. See, the series finale, “Mayberry R.F.D.” (R.F.D. stands for “Rural Free Delivery”), was titled as such because it was meant to be a backdoor pilot for an Andy Griffith Show spin-off. The famed CBS series had already spun off before with Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. (which starred Jim Nabors as Goober’s cousin Gomer, yes, the namesake of that Full Metal Jacket nickname), so ending the show with yet another series was an exciting prospect. Although many would’ve likely wanted to see Andy and Opie’s adventures continue into a new show, Sam and Mike were solid placeholders for the town of Mayberry.
Mayberry R.F.D. aired only five months after The Andy Griffith Show ended, centering on Sam Jones and his family. Strangely absent from the series was the Vincente family, who had been such a big part of the series finale that we thought they would be a shoo-in for the spin-off, but evidently, it proved too tiresome to bring them back to town. However, returning characters included Aunt Bee, Goober, Howard, and other Mayberry favorites, which helped make Mayberry R.F.D. feel like more of the same. In many ways, the Sam Jones-centered show was more of a sequel series than a traditional spin-off like Gomer Pyle, and that was to its benefit. Still centering the story in Mayberry helped bring in fans of the original series, and bringing back old-time favorites certainly didn’t hurt.
But no matter how much it wanted to be, Mayberry R.F.D. wasn’t The Andy Griffith Show. Sure, Andy Griffith returned as Andy Taylor in a handful of appearances in the first season (and only once more thereafter), but he and Opie were no longer the central focus of the town’s happenings. Bringing back cast members from the original series may have helped get Mayberry R.F.D. off the ground, but it also prevented the show from finding its own identity apart from the original. Of course, the series was successful in the ratings for its first two years, though it was ultimately canceled after its third season as another victim of CBS’s infamous “rural purge.” After that, we didn’t see much of Andy Taylor or his friends again. But what happened to Andy following The Andy Griffith Show?
