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.
It's been a good 40 years since I watched that show.
Norman Lear was a credited writer on several programs in the 1960’s and also did uncredited work on several other programs in the 1960’s “funnying up” scripts and sometimes fine tuning dialogue and storylines. This is a common practice in Hollywood that continues to this day.
Lear did frequent work for Screen Gems (which made the The Partridge Family) and themes from these shows often showed up in Lear’s later productions and you could argue he was plagiarizing them except for the probability that he was the original writer anyway.
I’m kind of surprised the Cancel Culture hasn’t come after Lear, because he portrayed black people as racists, and according to the new dogma, people of color cannot be racist.
“They were responding to the culture around them.”
No, they were influencing the culture around them. And kindly don’t tell me TV had no effect on people when trillions have been spent on TV advertising over the decades.
No question, that TV changed society, and not for the better.
And now we’ve seen the disruption that Social Media has brought about.
I just wonder how you could have stopped it.
Two words, “The Fog”
Agree. I thought it sucked.
“All in the Family” was a remake of a British show with the exact same concept. Even on AITF he was hardly involved as a writer at all. He was a Producer/Show Runner who hired the writers.
To me that is the salient point. We couldn’t have people laughing *with* Jed Clampett - tbey must ne taught to laugh *at* Archie Bunker.
It goes both ways. But TV was generally way behind the general culture till the 70s.
Ditto for Sanford & Son, it was based on the British show, “Steptoe and Son”.
Archie Bunker was Right!
Yeah, I mentioned that scene earlier.
And in general Lionel truly liked Archie, he understood him, and saw him as a decent guy, he understood he came from a different time.
I’ll let you on something I won’t post in public:
My primary career is in IT but over the years I’ve written for a number of people including then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, Lyn Nofziger, Phil Gramm, Pat Buchanan, and more recently I was tapped by a friend to fine tune dialogue in the first season of “Jack Ryan”.
When I attended the writer’s meeting for Ryan I got to meet Jay Leno who was there to tweak some of the sly humor and then he proficiently tweaked some of the military dialogue. Impressed the hell out of me.
He’s not credited and neither am I.
The uncredited writing work/phenomenon in Hollywood is quite fascinating and it grew out of the blacklist period when communists were tapped by friends to tweak scripts (or write them entirely).
Ditto to all those who realize that the show back fired. America loved Archie and despised meathead. Of course communist hypocrite Lear would never turn down a $ and / or was so blind to the fact that America was laughing with Archie not AT him.
Edith: “Archie you’re home”
Archie: “No Edith, I’m still at the plant!”
Always loved that line.
Oh I’m well aware of script doctoring etc. Some of them want credit but the WGA won’t allow it. The point is that Lear is not really a great enough comedy writer to have that much of an effect. They had top tier comedy writers on AITF.
I could be wrong, but I think Lear made Maude to exhibit what an "enlightened" liberal was, and how "superior" she was to that brute Archie Bunker.
Maude is an elitist snob who thinks she is better than everyone else.
Watch how Bea Arthur walks around.
Literally with her nose in the air.
A totally repulsive, unlikable character.
AITF is funny, even today.
Maude is unwatchable.
Maude went unwanted in syndication. That’s why you rarely saw reruns of it. Local stations didn’t want it.
I also recall an episode where Laurie Partridge was in a beauty contest just so she could win and give a speech about how beauty contests oppress women.
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