Actor Andy Griffith’s second-greatest series, courtroom drama Matlock, was a ratings success and viewer favorite.
Just as it took time to find his character on The Andy Griffith Showa proper love interest, so on Matlock finding celebrated defense attorney Ben Matlock the perfect right-hand daughter took some time. Nine seasons of time.
‘Matlock’ came at just the right time for Griffith
In Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show, author Daniel de Visé remarked on Matlock‘s magic ratings touch.
“Matlock aired at 8:00 p.m. Tuesday nights, opposite ABC’s Who’s the Boss? and Growing Pains, both top 10 shows in the 1986-87 season,” he wrote.
One of the show’s producers, Joel Steiger, was quoted by de Visé as saying, “Our job was to come in a strong second. And we did it, forever. We knew almost immediately that this show was going to be successful and was going to continue.”
Griffith loved playing ‘Matlock’
After having played Sheriff Andy Taylor for nearly 10 years in the 1960s, Griffith needed a new start. He’d portrayed various characters in the years between the Griffith Show‘s end in 1968 and Matlock‘s start in 1986. He didn’t know it, but Matlock was his next sure thing.
“I loved the character of Matlock,” the actor explained to the Television Academy Foundation in 1998. “Matlock’s very bright, he’s very cheap, very vain, all the things I’m not. I enjoyed that character a lot. I just wanted it to be entertaining within that framework. I got in a lot of fights with the judges, I got in a lot of fights with the prosecutor because it was funny. I would orchestrate those fights, often. I’d get myself thrown out of the courtroom, put in jail, because it’s funny.”
Ben Matlock’s 3 ‘daughters’
Throughout the show’s nine seasons, the characters of Ben Matlock’s daughters changed in casting regularly.
Matlock went through three “daughter” actors on the series.
Lori Lethin was Ben’s younger daughter Charlene in the pilot episode in 1986.
The Office‘s Linda Purl then assumed the role of Charlene in the first season. Speculation has swirled as to whether Purl left due to a lack of attention in scripts to her role or if she was let go from the legal drama.
Nancy Stafford played something of a daughter figure. Stafford was Ben Matlock’s law partner Michelle Thomas on the show from 1986 to 1992. By 1992, the show was dropped by NBC and then picked up by ABC the same year.
During the move to ABC, Stafford left the series and in her place, BrynnThayer joined the cast as Ben’s older daughter Leanne McIntyre and stayed from 1992 to 1994.
Matlock is an American television legal drama, starring Andy Griffith, that ran from March 3, 1986, to May 8, 1992, on NBC and from November 5, 1992, to May 4, 1995, on ABC.
MacIntyre is Matlock's daughter. After divorcing her husband, of whom her father did not much approve, she moves back to Atlanta to help him with his legal practice. She assists her father for three years before leaving for her own practice.
Losing a case was a rarity for Matlock, but he has had the occasion to correct that, as with Lester Matthews (The Convict), when Lester was tried for murdering a fellow inmate. Another one he lost was when Ken Wilson was arrested for killing his wife (The Black Widow).
The Andy Griffith Show was broadcast on CBS Television from October 1960 to September 1968 (a total of 249 episodes), making it one of the most enduring and influential shows in American television history.
Matlock aired a total of 193 episodes across nine seasons and began with a TV-movie. 12 two-hour and 15 two-part episodes of the program were aired. Six of the episodes were clip shows with mostly minor plots that paved the way for scenes from previous stories.
The ninth and final season of Matlock originally aired in the United States on ABC with a two hour season premiere from October 13, 1994 and a two hour series finale on May 4, 1995.
As a struggling actress, she was mentored in the business by legendary actor/comedian/singer and writer Andy Griffith. After becoming a lifelong fan of Griffith's, since girlhood, her first television exposure with Griffith was a co-starring role opposite him in the Matlock (1986) series.
After a ratings slide and company restructuring, NBC canceled Matlock after its sixth season, only for it to air three more on ABC. With this reboot, the Matlock title will have now aired on all three broadcast networks that program 10 pm.
From 1987-1994 Julie joined Andy Griffith in "Matlock," playing his love interest Assistant District Attorney, Julie March. In 1990 she received her second Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama for the role.
However, when Griffith reprised the role of Ben Matlock in a 1997 episode of Diagnosis Murder, fans found out some bad financial advice may be the root cause to the same suit every case and the endless amounts of dogs. Between 1996 and 1997, Diagnosis Murder was in its fourth season.
What was Andy Griffith's net worth and Salary? Andy Griffith was an American actor and singer who had a net worth of $25 million at the time of his death. After adjusting for inflation, that's the same as around $66 million in today's dollars.
Episode 145: The Mark When Billy Wheeler comes back to town $250,000 richer after having won the lottery, he soon falls for contractor Judy Wilson. But when she takes him for a ride, Billy is accused of her murder, and Matlock must clear his name.
He was 34 years old in 1960 when he ventured into weekly television for the first time. The result was The Andy Griffith Show, an iconic series about an idyllic place — the fictional town of Mayberry, N.C., which seemed far removed from the real-life turbulence of the 1960s.
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