Filmed and set in California, it stars Jim Nabors as Gomer Pyle, a naïve but good-natured gas station attendant from the town of Mayberry, North Carolina, who enlists in the United States Marine Corps.

Everett Greenbaum and Jim Fritzell, writers for The Andy Griffith Show, are credited with creating the character of Gomer Pyle.

The character was based on an "incompetent" gas station attendant whom Greenbaum met and named after Gomer Cool (a writer) and Denver Pyle (an actor on The Andy Griffith Show).

[2] Jim Nabors was cast to play Gomer; he had been performing for a Santa Monica nightclub, The Horn, when Andy Griffith discovered him.

[6][7] Like other comedies at the time, Gomer Pyle was a "deep escapist" show; it avoided political commentary and offered viewers a distraction from the social changes of the 1960s.

[10] Frank Sutton, who played Carter, ascribed the show's popularity to its concentration on its two main characters, and the plots being built around their respective personalities.

Nabors also carried the Gomer Pyle character to fellow CBS series The Lucy Show, in which he made a cameo appearance in a 1966 episode.

Nabors always said he had a hard time watching the show's opening credits, as many of the Marines he was filmed training with were later killed in Vietnam.

[29] The premise of Gomer Pyle is similar to and perhaps inspired by Andy Griffith's starring role in the Broadway play and film version of No Time for Sergeants, which was based on the Mac Hyman novel of the same title.

[35][36] Like other comedies of the 1960s, the show avoided political commentary (especially concerning the Vietnam War) and focused instead on the predicaments that ensued from Gomer's unintentional breaking of the rules or sticking his foot in his mouth.

[37][38] Among the themes explored were the honesty and "strong family values supposedly inherent in small-town life"; according to author Gerard Jones, Gomer Pyle's basic message was "far simpler than any corporate suburban sitcoms with their lessons in compromise and role-following [...] It said merely that the oldest, most basic, least sophisticated sort of sweetness could redeem even the toughest modern types".

[1][39] Author Elizabeth Hirschman noted that Gomer represented a "uniquely American archetype"—a "large, powerful man physically" with the "simple, honest nature of a child or animal".

She also noted that, like stories with characters of such an archetype, Gomer's trusting nature was often taken advantage of, though in the end he "reaps happiness" because of his innocence.

Gomer Pyle (played by Jim Nabors), from Mayberry, North Carolina, is a good-natured and innocent private whose naïveté constantly annoys his drill instructor, Sergeant Carter.

Gomer was created as a stereotype of a rural American; according to Time, he "wears a gee-whiz expression, spouts homilies out of a lopsided mouth and lopes around uncertainly like a plowboy stepping through a field of cow dung.

Due to the audience's demand for more family-oriented programming, he eventually revealed his softer side: Carter became a father figure to Gomer as well as his best friend.

[1][10][34] Sutton stated that his character was created "out of whole cloth for the show" and, as the actor played him "by ear," Carter greatly changed during the first season.

She debuts in the third season as a singer for a nightclub, but leaves the job at Gomer's urging to return home to Turtle Creek, North Carolina, and marry her beau Monroe Efford.

In Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film Full Metal Jacket, the nickname "Gomer Pyle" is given to Private Leonard Lawrence (played by Vincent D'Onofrio) as a derogatory term during boot camp, after incurring the drill instructor's wrath for being unable to turn off his idiot's grin and his perceived incompetence.

[55][56] A brief clip of the show airing on American Forces Vietnam Network television appears during the military hospital scene in the 1994 film Forrest Gump.

[57] E. Kitzes Knox wrote a novel based on the series, also titled Gomer Pyle – USMC The paperback was published by Pyramid and released in 1966.