Andy the Marriage Counselor

Summary

Mayberry newcomers Fred and Jennie Boone are constantly causing domestic disturbances with their fighting, so Andy decides to play marriage counselor to the bickering couple - with disastrous results!

Plot

Fred and Jennie Boone are relatively new to Mayberry and they get along well with everyone in town. But they can't interact with each other without yelling and fighting. Andy gets fed up with having to arrest them for disturbing the peace and comes up a novel idea. Every morning he will coach Fred and Jennie on ways to be not only civil with each other, but practically loving. Although Barney is convinced it won't work he's amazed at the results. It doesn't take long before Fred and Jennie can tolerable with one another. Proud of the results, Andy uses the same philosophy on Opie and his friend Billy, offering them each a nickel if they can play nice without fighting.

Fred and Jennie are quite pleasant to one another, but turn mean and hateful against all their friends and neighbors. Opie too seems unhappy because he and Billy have to play nice and they say it's not fun anymore. Andy realizes what looks like fighting to one person may really be dancing to someone else. After resolving the issues with Opie and Billy, he goes over to the Boone's house and utilizes a little reverse psychology. He has the Boones fighting with each other again. In no time, things are back to where they started.

Trivia/Notes

In this episode, we find out that Barney is a student of the martial arts. The gag that he does with Andy, showing Andy his newly acquired Judo skills, will be repeated later in the season. In the epilogue to this episode Barney sports his full Judo outfit.
Jesse White appears in this episode as the cantankerous Fred Boone. Jesse is perhaps best known for being the original Maytag Repairman in a series Maytag commercials that ran for decades.
The first episode the infamous "night filter" is used over the camera lens to fool viewers into thinking it's night time. They used this filter throughout the black and white episodes any time they needed to portray a night time setting such as when the fellows went out on dates etc. Using the night filter allowed them to get away with shooting night time scenes in broad daylight. When used in conjunction with turning on headlights and porchlights etc, they hoped it would pass as night time on black and white film. At best, all it did was dim the visibility a little bit. In this episode, as Andy and Barney approch the front door of the Boones house, the director is using the night filter and has the porch light turned on, but it's cleary broad daylight and the peoples shadows indicate its about mid morning; about 8 or 9 AM.