A lot of families really were like that during the 1970s. You had your working-class patriarch slog off to work every day to pay the bills and when he came home, his stay-at-home wife would fetch him the newspaper and a beer and then go make dinner while he sat down to the 6 o'clock news.
Then at dinner, his deadbeat, unemployed college-educated kids would sit around the dinner table with their high-minded ideas of how the world should work and more often than not, a big argument would break out with the kids rushing out of the kitchen in tears while the wife would flutter around and tell her husband not to be such a narrow-minded meanie around the kids.
Yep, I lived it as well as watched it on TV! My siblings and I argued with Dad about all kinds of stuff. Long hair, Watergate, Vietnam, rock music, premarital sex, etc. And always in the end, we ran out of liberal cliches and realized Dad was right all along. Fortunately I grew up, joined the Marines and went a different political direction than "Meathead." Nowadays, I'm a lot more like Archie Bunker!
Speaking of Archie Bunker, I'm the same age now as Carroll O'Connor was when he started playing that role. And my kids are the same age as Meathead and Sally Struthers. Scary stuff. Only difference is, if I tell my wife to fetch me a beer, I'll end up with a bump on my head.
I like the show because it brings back memories for me too. The colors,the fashions,the set looks a lot like a Camden NJ row home back in the day. Archie reminds me of my Uncle Hank!
I grew up in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s also, yet my experience was different. In my family, mom went to work five days a week after the youngest child was in school all day... dad worked hard too, of course. We kids thought we knew everything. But mom was never fetching dad a beer, etc. She was a strong woman in her own right. But then I grew up in the South.