Archie was obviously a made-up character and his lines were scripted to shock and offend. But most viewers realized that Archie was over-the-top and that normal Americans didn't really speak or act that way. But Meathead was a dead-ringer for a virtue-signaling (decades before the term was coined) college-educated liberal with a head full of mush.
It was not lost on me, as a growing boy, that this deadbeat had to live with his in-laws because despite his college education, he couldn't afford a place of his own, while his supposedly ignorant blue collar father-in-law worked every day and got all the bills paid.
For the rest of my childhood, I vowed not to end up like Meathead!
Lear himself-—an unrequited liberal——said in his autobio he fashioned the series to belittle working class Americans that sounded like Archie.
As you testified, it didn’t have the desired effect. So what-— Lear had tons of money.
In the last analysis, Lear was driven by money. The series was a huge success. He divorced his wife—she got 100 million dollars——safe to assume he had the other half.
Actually, Archie was very much real - he sounded exactly like my Irish American Catholic family who lived in Queens for two generations. That, plus Carroll O’Connors’ brilliant performance, is what made it so popular. Also, as I recall, the Meathead character was a monument to hypocrisy - a freeloading, fake lib who was disliked by all the black characters in the show.