Posted on 01/11/2021 10:14:04 AM PST by Borges
There was a time when racism could be funny.
On Jan. 12, 1971, a skittish CBS television network premiered an unusual television show as a mid-season replacement in its primetime lineup. The sitcom, modeled on a successful British version, starred veteran actor Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker, a bigoted dockworker living in Astoria with his dimwitted wife, feminist daughter and liberal son-in-law.
“The program you are about to see called ‘All in the Family,’ ” read a text advisory before the show (it would now be termed a trigger warning). “It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter we hope to show — in mature fashion — just how absurd they are.” The network hired extra operators to handle a tsunami of complaints.
The reaction was not what CBS expected. It was, in fact, more of a non-reaction. The pilot episode got 15% of the viewing audience, finishing in 55th place for the week. In its first month, “All in the Family” drew about 10 million viewers a week — monster numbers now, but decidedly anemic in a broadcast era of television where a successful show drew about twice that.
Perhaps ironically, the people most interested in the show in its early months were the intelligentsia.
“Is it funny, for example, to have the pot-bellied, church-going, cigar-smoking son of Middle America, Archie Bunker, the hero of ‘All in the Family,’ fill the screen with such epithets as ‘spic’ and ‘spade’ and ‘hebe’ and ‘yid’ and ‘polack’?” asked New York Times writer Fred Ferretti in a review that appeared the day the show made its debut. “Is it funny for him to refer to his son-in-law as ‘the laziest white man I ever seen’?”
Ferretti’s view was clear: “The answer, I say, is no.” Yet the dean of television critics, Cleveland Armory of TV Guide, proclaimed it as “the best thing on commercial television.” “Archie Bunker is real,” wrote Pamela Haynes for the (African American) Los Angeles Sentinel. “Far from protesting, members of minorities slandered by Archie should rejoice at this non-cosmetized portrait of the ‘master race.’ ”
The creator of “All in the Family,” Norman Lear, knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote and directed the pilot for the show. He went out of his way to cast a pleasant-looking actor for the part and to situate him in a loving, if boisterous, family.
“The point of his character,” he said of Archie, “was to show that if bigotry and intolerance didn’t exist in the hearts and minds of good people, the average people, it would not be the endemic problem it is in our society.”
There were some who objected to this premise, but Lear held fast. He also held fast to a formula that marked the show for its nine-year run: Every time Archie said something ridiculous or offensive, there was always someone — often his son-in-law Mike (Rob Reiner), daughter Gloria (Sally Struthers) or his ingenuous wife Edith (Jean Stapleton), but just as likely a Puerto Rican nurse, African-American businessman, gay former football player, or any number of other in a diverse array of characters — who would highlight his absurdity. And yet Archie was also the quintessential working man who supported his family and who, every once in a while, would show flashes of decency.
But “All in the Family” was always more than a cleverly constructed political soapbox. What became the number one show on television for five years running was a miracle of artistry. Some of this was a matter of incomparable one-liners, like Archie’s famous malapropisms (“Patience is a virgin”; “Don’t draw me no diaphragms”; “It’s a proven fact that capital punishment is a detergent to crime.”). Some was a matter of acting, as in the remarkable plasticity of O’Connor’s face or Stapleton’s wondrous ability to find dignity, even wisdom, in the character of Edith. And some was the complexity with which the show handled topics that included rape, menopause and anti-Semitism even as it found humor in all of them. The affection the show engendered is visible in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where Archie and Edith’s living room chairs have been on display for decades.
Was there — is there — a risk that viewers could take Archie Bunker or his successors the wrong way, that they could secretly or openly embrace foolish or dangerous ideas? Yes. This is the price of artistic freedom — and vitality. But the potential gains in enlightenment and useful debate are worth it if we believe ordinary people can be entrusted with ambiguous truths. Laughter, among other things, can be revealing.
My father never understood that they were making fun of people like him.
Boy,the way Glenn Miller played...
What’s funny is that Archie and Lionel got along fine.
There was a great episode where Lionel dressed down Meathead for only wanting to talk about racial issues, “Why don’t we ever talk about the weather, black people have weather too you know.”
I was young. Hated that show. Very heavy handed and stupid, it seemed to me. I know they were going for a certain “style” of presentation and message sending, but it came across to me as awful acting by all involved.
But the Archie and Meathead in that first episode did change over the years.
The scene that will always stay with me is the Thanksgiving episode with the Draft Dodger, and Archie’s reaction, that wasn’t for laughs, it was real and you could feel Archie’s revulsion.
Established the precedent that conservative characters can only be portrayed by liberals, with storylines and dialogue written by liberals.
Nonetheless, the audiences instinctively Archie and Edith much better than Gloria and the Meathead.
Gloria was incredibly hot. Sorry, I was a 15 year old boy at the time.
Archie Bunker was a hero to my father and I.
Maybe it didn’t always turn out right, but he kept trying to do the right thing to the best of knowledge and ability.
Look at the episode with the Draft dodger. O’Connor gives one of the best performances in TV history.
Archie was a good man.
I can count the number of episodes I saw on one hand. Not my kind of entertainment.
Because "normal" viewers perceived Meathead, Gloria, and other bufoons as the butt of jokes, and Archie as an ordinary guy. It's why the show was so successful.
Lear intended the show as a parody of conservatism, and it backfired.
Archie was the ultimate strawman for liberals to punch.
I hated that show.
Ironically, they could never get away with airing that show today.
Archie was right then and he’s right now...Meathead is an asshole.
Same situation with the British version, whose first episodes were in black and white. Alf Garnett (on whom Archie was based) was played by liberal actor Warren Mitchell.
I totally agree. They made Archie look like a low IQ buffoon with lots of laugh track noise whenever he expounded his thoughts aloud. That kind of shaming and criticsm continues to today with all (and I mean "all) heterosexuals being portrayed as mindless boobs who "just don't understand" how being a homosexual is so wonderful and beyond question.
Actually it is on in reruns.
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