Here's a great photo of Don Knotts holding one of his five Emmy Awards and posing with Carl Reiner and Peter Falk. And I can't help but note that we have here three people who were in the movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
A couple other thoughts. Barney Fife was one of the all-time great TV characters and we have Andy Griffith to thank for that, and not just for casting Don. There have been a lot of stars who simply would not have allowed someone else to walk off with their program the way Andy let Don Knotts dominate The Andy Griffith Show. Oh, they'd let the producers hire someone funnier than them…but they sure wouldn't let him be funnier in that many episodes. Andy was wise enough to let Don be Don and it sure didn't hurt either man's career.
At the end of five years of Griffith shows, Don left. CBS offered very large dollars to keep him on their network and there was brief talk of a spin-off show that would have moved Barney Fife to a bigger city as a detective. Knotts wasn't interested. He'd signed with Universal to do movies and he did several…to sadly diminishing returns. It was mostly a matter of bad timing. The film industry was changing then and he was a few years late to be doing non-Disney family comedies. Even Jerry Lewis was no longer packing them in with that kind of material.
I don't know what Don's best movie was from this period — maybe The Ghost and Mr. Chicken — but the most interesting is probably The Love God?, which was a halting attempt to do something a tad more adult. The film was written and directed by Nat Hiken, the gent who'd brought us Sgt. Bilko and Car 54, Where Are You? I've always wanted to find a copy of the original screenplay for The Love God? — not the version Hiken directed but an earlier draft that was, legend has it, quite unlike the finished film and absolutely hysterical. It was to have co-starred Phil Silvers but Silvers was undergoing emotional problems at the time and declined. For reasons unknown, Hiken then despoiled his own script and made, as the last thing he did before he died, a not very good movie. I once got to ask Don about all this and he just shook his head and said, yes, Hiken had written a wonderful script and somehow — Don didn't know how — they wound up not making it.
There's actually a bit of irony to The Love God? Don's character was a meek little guy who was transformed into quite the ladies' man. In real life, Don was probably closer to that persona — or at least to would-be swinger Ralph Furley on Three's Company — than he was to Barney Fife.
When that film crashed and burned, Knotts decided to return to television and that's when he had some more bad luck. CBS still wanted him and he might have been a better fit in their schedule. But he couldn't do TV without a release from his movie deal with Universal…and Universal was mainly in business then with NBC, which wanted Don, if only to keep him off CBS. A deal was finally brokered which went something like this: NBC agreed to pick up a faltering Universal series, The Virginian, for another season in exchange for which the studio released Knotts to do TV…but only for NBC. Don reluctantly accepted the deal and soon regretted it.
NBC initially scheduled The Don Knotts Show for a great time slot on Thursday nights and pencilled in their other new variety series for the fall of 1970, The Flip Wilson Show, for a less-promising period on Tuesday. Then someone noticed a problem. On Tuesday, Flip Wilson would follow Julia, a sitcom with Diahann Carroll. That would put the only two shows on the network with black stars back-to-back, creating what some might criticize as a ghetto or some kind of schedule segregation. To escape this, they flipped Flip, giving Mr. Wilson the better berth on Thursday and consigning Don's program to a less-than-ideal day and hour. It was a pretty good show but it didn't get much of a chance. Wilson's show, on the other hand, thrived. A close friend of Don's once told me it was one of only two professional matters about which Don had lingering bitterness, the other being how little money he made off Andy Griffith Show reruns.
He was never out of work, of course. He still did movies and constant TV guest appearances before he joined Three's Company. But he never had that big hit he wanted as the one and only star of something. He was always teamed with someone like Tim Conway or cast in what was clearly a supporting role. Still, no one was ever more loved by audiences…and the times I saw Don in person and out in public, I got the feeling that he was aware of that but some part of him still could not believe it. When you told him how wonderful he was, he still blushed a bit and acted like you'd done him a tremendous favor, even though you were at least the eightieth person to tell him that in the past hour. But he was wonderful…in everything he ever did. If you don't believe me, ask anyone. They'll tell you.