Hollywood
Q: Why aren’t color reruns shown of “The Andy Griffith Show”? It’s the same black and white reruns over and over again!
A: I can unpack this a little bit, but the basic reason why the color episodes of “The Andy Griffith Show” don’t run as often is because people don’t like them as much.
“Stations have historically recognized that the first five seasons ... are the most popular and considered, as a grouping, better than the final three seasons, which happen to be the color seasons,” Jim Clark of the Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club (yep, that’s a real thing) said in an interview with the Winstonsalem Journal.
Recognizing this, stations often choose not to air the latter three seasons, instead just starting over at the beginning after Season 5.
The answer to why they don’t like them is complicated somewhat by the timing. CBS began shooting the show in color in Season 6, which also happened to be the first season without Don Knotts as the lovable loser-y Deputy Barney Fife, one of the all-time great sitcom sidekicks.
Knotts left the show to pursue a film career. It turned out to be a good move for him — he had a great run as a leading man in a series of late ‘60s farces — but it left the show without a deputy, and left Andy somewhat lost (according to some accounts) as a wise, stable straight man lacking a goofball to get him into trouble (though he did retain his lovable little boy, Opie, played by now-famous director Ron Howard). Knotts was replaced, briefly, by a couple of new deputies (played by Jack Burns and Jerry Van Dyke), but it wasn’t the same.
Q: I loved “Outsiders” with David Morse. Is there more or did they not renew the series?
A:the (bad) news of WGN America’s cancellation of “Outsiders” got a little lost in the bigger news of the network’s sale (along with its parent company) a few months later in 2017. That might be why you didn’t hear about it, and it might also be why it happened.
“Outsiders,” a gritty drama about a clan living an isolationist, hardscrabble life in the Appalachian mountains, was WGN’S highest-rated show, and so its cancellation came as a bit of a surprise.
However, in a bit of transparency that’s too rare in the TV biz, Peter Kern, president of WGN’S parent company (at the time) Tribune Media, explained the decision.
He said the company wanted to, “expand both the quantity and breadth of content aired by Wgnamerica,”and that,“to free up the resources to reach this goal, we will unfortunately not be renewing ‘Outsiders.’”
That is to say, “Outsiders” was expensive, and the company had bigger plans. Those bigger plans turned out to be sale to a different company — Sinclair. Deadline.com speculated that “Outsiders” was canceled to improve WGN’S balance sheet ahead of the deal.