http://flavorwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/winter_kill.jpg

Let us stop to consider one of television’s most notorious flops, the famed failure in which Andy Griffith played a small-town sheriff. Wait, what? No, not The Andy Griffith Show — the other series in which Andy Griffith played a small-town sheriff. The former Andy Taylor left his eponymous series in 1968 (it was renamed Mayberry RFD and ran for three more seasons), but his film roles and subsequent series went nowhere, so in 1974, he did a TV movie called Winter Kill (above) in which he played Sam McNeill, sheriff of a small resort town. That movie was meant as the pilot for a serious mystery series, but when it wasn’t picked up, the show was reworked, the character was renamed Sam Adams, and Adams of Eagle Lake went on the air in January 1975.

Despite a solid supporting cast (including a young Nick Nolte as one of Griffith’s officers), only two episodes made it to air. Griffith, undeterred, tried again, playing another small town sheriff (renamed for the third time, now Sheriff Abel Marsh) in two 1977 TV movies called The Girl in the Empty Grave and Deadly Game. It wasn’t meant to be, though certainly not for lack of trying. Griffith finally had another TV hit a decade later, with the Abe Simpson-beloved Matlock.

http://flavorwire.com/289888/tvs-most-notoriously-short-lived-shows#3

I actually remembered seeing one episode of "Adams of Eagle Lake" on ABC. It bored me senseless. Nice seeing him in uniform again driving around in a cruiser (this time either a Ford Bronco or Chevy Blazer).

The 1970's by and large were not kind to Andy Griffith, although he got to expand his range a bit.


Andy Griffith did a show called "The Headmaster" in the early 1970's. Griffith played a high school headmaster and the show was more relevant to 70's television, and Griffith stated himself that he was out of his element playing the role and the show failed.

Then there was the New Andy Griffith Show where he played a mayor of another North Carolina town and it failed also.

This to me was a very interesting article of Griffith's TV career from 1960 until Matlock.

http://www.tvparty.com/andy.html

I've seen Winter Kill and it was a good made for TV movie, but I never knew it was the pilot for a failed TV Show.

Griffith finally had another TV hit a decade later, with the Abe Simpson-beloved Matlock.



"MAAAATLOOOOOOOCK!" :lol:

I never knew that, but there was ONE silver lining for Andy Griffith in the 70's...when he was the narrator of "Frosty's Winter Wonderland".

he was GREAT as a J.R. Ewing-type character in a made for TV movie in the 80s called "Murder in Cowatta County".

The only one of these I have ever seen was The Girl in the Empty Grave, which I caught one day on a rerun in the late 1980's, and I recall it being a pretty decent mystery, though nothing exceptional.