Interesting take. I admit I was a bit young for the show. My Mom watched it religiously, so I saw parts of it here & there. I thought Archie came off pretty well in most cases? If that’s not the way it was, then obviously you know far more about it than I do. I’m happy to stand corrected.
Ironically, it was just three days ago that I finally looked up a LaSalle, to see what Archie & Edith were signing about in the opening. Just judging from the song, I’d have thought it was a pretty good show. Do you recall the lines, ‘Didn’t need no welfare state; everybody pulled his weight’? To me, that sounds like conservatism. ;)
(PS: from what I recall, Meathead always got the worst of the argument. Am I misremembering this completely?)
I was in my teens when this show was popular, and I loved it as well as most of the TV watching peoples did.
But now it retrospect I see it was the beginning of shaping pop culture toward the lib side of town.
Archie with his conservative views was always depicted as an idiot racist bigot.
Go over to the DUmp and you’ll see how they claim Archie had the “repukes” pegged.
It worked....and we laughed.
No, you got it right. Meathead began to look more ridiculous as the series unfolded and eventually he and Gloria divorced.
Meathead always got the worst of the argument.
To me MH was hard to like. I was in my early teens theb.