Boy, the way Glenn Miller played, songs that made ‘The Hit Parade.’ Guys like us, we had it made. Those were the days!”
This iconic theme song opened All in the Family, which premiered on January 12, 1971, exactly 40 years ago today. Revisiting the show via DVD or YouTube can spark an appreciation of what has changed in America and on American TV—and what hasn’t. It also underscores how unthinkable such a series would be today.
Developed by Norman Lear, the CBS series revolved around a working-class Queens family: Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor), his “dingbat” wife Edith (Jean Stapleton), their daughter Gloria (Sally Struthers), and liberal son-in-law Mike “Meathead” Stivic (Rob Reiner). The plots included typical sitcom fare—misunderstandings, silly deceptions, crises that turned out to be minor. But at its heart, the show was about topical humor. The Bunkers and their friends and neighbors debated war, religion, drugs, gun control, sex, sexism, gay rights, race relations, immigration, taxation, the environmental movement, and more. The series wasn’t just a sitcom; it was an ongoing national conversation, driven by well-written, well-acted, multifaceted characters.
The historical specifics have changed since 1971, and so has the language we use to describe them. But the cultural fault lines and hot-button topics still have modern equivalents: racial, ethnic, and sexual upheaval, inflation and unemployment, liberal/conservative rancor, terrorism and war. In a 1972 episode, Archie delivered a pro-gun TV editorial that eerily echoed proposals made after 9/11. Archie’s solution to skyjackings? “Arm all your passengers… Just pass out the pistols at the beginning of the trip and pick them up again at the end. Case closed.”
It might be hard for younger viewers to imagine how striking this series was. Before the late ’60s and early ’70s, pop culture either made a big show of grappling with hot-button topics (usually in Oscar-baiting message films or dour live TV dramas) or ignored them entirely. There was a disconnect between private conversations and what you saw on TV, in movies, and on the radio. When Norman Lear got approval from CBS in 1969 to create an American version of the popular British sitcom Till Death Do Us Part—the same concept as All in the Family, but less elegantly directed and tonally adventurous—the boundaries separating socially aware art from mainstream entertainment became porous. Entertainment started to let the world in—not in dribs and drabs, but in torrents. All in the Family helped knock those barriers down.
“If your spics and your spades want their rightful share of the American dream, let ’em get out there and hustle for it, like I done,” Archie groused to Mike, who was advocating for civil rights yet again.
“So now you’re going to tell me the black man has just as much chance as the white man to get a job?” Mike demanded.
“More,” Archie said. “He has more. I didn’t have no million people marchin’ and protestin’ to get me my job.”
“No,” Edith interrupted. “His uncle got it for him.”
Characters bantered about touchy subjects, often in the presence of those sensitive to them. This was true in all sorts of TV shows and films, not just those considered Relevant and Important. Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle from The French Connection, released in the fall of ’71, was Archie Bunker’s fantasy supercop, a skull-cracking street enforcer who would have loved to bust Mike Stivic over the head with a nightstick. (“Um, um, um, um!” Archie would mock Mike’s nervous stammer. “You sound like a seal with its throat cut!”) Three years of Lear’s show likely helped prepare audiences for Mel Brooks’ 1974 smash Blazing Saddles, a racial burlesque on horseback that Archie’s neighbor George Jefferson—a black racist and pioneering small businessman—would have recommended to everyone he knew. ABC’s brutally violent detective show Starsky and Hutch—inspired by Dirty Harry and The French Connection—borrowed a running gag from All in the Family: black and white characters sarcastically telling members of other races, “You all look alike to me.”
The success of Lear’s show inspired good spinoffs (The Jeffersons, Maude), bad spinoffs (Gloria, Archie Bunker’s Place), and one spinoff of a spinoff (Good Times, starring Esther Rolle as Florida Evans, Maude’s former housekeeper). The dialogue wasn’t crafted in the post-Clinton, Seinfeld-ian vein of “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” Some nonwhite supporting characters were Sidney Poitier-style credit-to-his-race types Archie couldn’t rationally object to (like George’s son Lionel, a handsome, smiling cipher). But many were as warm, flawed, and raucous as Archie, with talk that was sometimes smart, sometimes dumb, and nearly always blunt. It was scalding but necessary, like steam from a teakettle.
“I’m gonna go into town and get me a good Jew lawyer,” Archie fumed.
“Do you always have to label people?” Mike asked. “Why can’t you just get a lawyer? Why does it have to be a Jewish lawyer?”
“Because if I’m going to sue an Ay-rab, I want a guy that’s full o’ hate!”
“Racial balance is important in everything,” Mike declared in another episode. “Take education: Why do you think it’s so tough for a black student to become a doctor?”
Archie: “Because nobody wants to see a black guy coming at them with a knife.”
The show’s core sensibility was basically liberal; that’s why Archie got stuck with all the malapropisms. But it would be wrong to claim the series had no sympathy for Archie or that he was just a rhetorical punching bag, or that Mike was intended as a righteous truth-teller, a mouthpiece and role model for enlightened Americans. O’Connor was such an appealing performer—never more so than when Archie dropped the bluster and spoke from the heart—that the character became an emblem of working-class grit and World War II-era resilience. (In one of President Richard Nixon’s secret White House tapes, Nixon and his staff decry the show’s ribbing of Archie and affectionately label him a “hard hat.”) It wasn’t lost on the writers—or the audience—that Mike and Gloria sponged off Edith and Archie even as they lectured them on proper behavior. Archie ridiculed Mike’s mooching in almost every episode; it was his knockout punch after Mike zinged him with college-kid verbal jabs. (In the episode where Edith befriends a lonely old man at the local supermarket, Mike asks why the fellow can’t live with them, and Archie barks, “Because we’ve already got one freeloader living with me, and bread’s up 10 cents a loaf!”)
The program seamlessly switched from broad comedy to kitchen-sink drama and back. The blocking was more akin to televised theater than traditional three-camera sitcoms. When characters turned introspective, the camera would slowly zoom from a medium shot to a tight close-up, creating an intimate space for delicate monologues.
An extraordinary moment from the 1978 episode “Two’s a Crowd” showcases this. Archie and Mike, locked in the storeroom of Archie’s bar, pass the time by drinking and talking. Drunk, Archie casually states that his father taught him everything he knows. When Mike suggests Archie’s father was wrong to pass on his bigotry, director Paul Bogart zooms in on O’Connor, who transforms from a soused buffoon into an innocent boy living in terror and awe of his dad—slowly, patiently, with such grace and concentration that the studio audience’s laughter dies out like campfire embers, then nervously sputters to life again. “Your father?” Archie asks. “The breadwinner of the house? The man who goes out and busts his butt to put a roof over your head and clothes on your back? You call your father wrong?” As critic Edward Copeland writes, “Those emotional moments on All in the Family could be its strongest ones, topping the laughs.”
TV today is inhospitable to series like All in the Family. This is partly due to the splintering of TV from a handful of channels into hundreds. But broadcast network executives and marketers, who realized in the late ’80s they could make more ad money by targeting white college graduates with disposable income, also share the blame. This demographic shift rules out characters like those in All in the Family (even Mike or Gloria). Except for certain cable channels that thrive on shows about violent crime or revolve around working-class or poor characters, race, class, religion, and politics are rarely discussed on TV. And when they are, the dialogue is often jocular, sarcastic, or part of a Very Special Episode. Can you remember the last time a broadcast network built a sitcom around 50-something, pear-shaped, working-class married people of any color? Most modern sitcom leads are under 40 and fashionably thin or buff.
Since the early ’80s, networks have gentrified prime time, banishing demographically déclassé characters and subjects while retaining elements marketers call “sexy” (code for “flashily empty”). Little remains of Lear’s legacy but cursing, innuendo, and the sound of flushing toilets. Most modern network sitcoms, epitomized by Friends—a true Show About Nothing—are about dating, parenthood, and office politics. They address hot-button issues glancingly, if at all. Some are lame. Some are amusing. A few are brilliant. None equal All in the Family. Those were the days.
