California, where most of the Mayberry exteriors were filmed in the original series, had been razed in 1976. For this movie, the town of Los Olivos, California doubled for Mayberry, with a stretch of Grand Avenue being used for the town square. A reconstruction of the original courthouse set was built in a small park at the corner of Grand and Alamo Pintado Avenues. The mid-intersection flagpole seen repeatedly in the movie is a veterans memorial that was built in Los Olivos shortly after World War I. Ratings and Reception Return to Mayberry premiered on April 13, 1986 at 9:00pm (ET/PT) as part of NBC Sunday Night at the Movies, and earned a Nielsen rating of 33.0, meaning around one-third of the TV-viewing public had tuned in to the broadcast. It became the top-rated made-for-TV movie of the 1985-86 season, and the second most-watched program that week (behind The Cosby Show). Although Return to Mayberry was a ratings success, its critical reception was mixed. A review in The New York Times opined that its "slow pace, extremely modest level of humor and straightforward and predictable plotting make Return to Mayberry a less appealing reunion for the audience than it may have been for its actors." Time discussed the film only when it was in its last days of production, saying, "Even on TV's crowded reunion calendar, Return to Mayberry is a special event", but offering no substantive comment on the merits of the finished product. More recent reviews have been kinder, calling it "marvelous blast from the past" and a reunion that "worked largely because the producers kept the original flavour of the series yet brought the show up to date". 2004 re-broadcast Mayberry was rebroadcast on Veterans Day in 2004 by some ABC affiliates as a replacement for the network's unedited rebroadcast of the film Saving Private Ryan. Ryan included language which the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had ruled "indecent and profane" in March 2004, and Mayberry was seen as a safer alternative, despite the fact that Ryan had already aired on the network in 2001 and 2002. The chief executive of Citadel Communications — the main affiliate owner to rebroadcast Mayberry — cited the recent 2004 US Presidential election as a justification. "We're just coming off an election where moral issues were cited as a reason by people voting one way or another", the executive said, "and, in