During an engaging chat with Lena Dunham at the Sundance Film Festival, Norman Lear, the visionary creator of All in the Family, shared insights on knowing when to end a TV series—a timely topic as Dunham’s Girls approaches its sixth and final season.
Lear recounted the differing opinions among the All in the Family cast as the show neared its conclusion in its ninth season. Rob Reiner believed it was time to wrap things up, while Jean Stapleton was ambivalent about continuing past the 1979 series finale. Carroll O’Connor, however, was eager to keep the show going.
“The only one who didn’t want to stop was Carroll, and he was the most difficult,” Lear admitted. “It was very difficult dealing with him as Archie Bunker—I worshipped the ground he walked on. There couldn’t be another Archie Bunker in the history of the world; he inhabited it like no one else could. Having said that, it was very difficult.”
O’Connor’s determination led to the creation of Archie Bunker’s Place, a spinoff that Lear was initially against. “I didn’t want that to happen, and I prevented it from happening for some months. My partners and the network, of course, wanted it,” Lear explained. The spinoff, which aired for four seasons on CBS until 1983, shifted the setting from the Bunker family home to Archie’s local tavern and was not filmed before a live studio audience.
Lear recalled a pivotal moment when William Paley, the network owner, invited him to lunch to discuss the continuation of Archie’s story. “The only time I met Mr. Paley was when he called to ask me to lunch, nine years later, to talk about wanting Archie Bunker’s Place on air,” Lear noted. “The only way it got on was when he called me to his office and had four or five pages of names of people who would be out of work if the show didn’t go on. And so the show went on.”
Though Lear didn’t delve into specifics about why O’Connor was difficult to work with, he did offer some reflection. “He didn’t understand the character the way I felt I wished him to be, and he was the character! God, that’s all so interesting and complicated. It’s hard to be a human being, have you noticed that?”
Lear’s reflections underscore the complexities of creative collaboration, especially when dealing with a character as iconic and multifaceted as Archie Bunker.