Those were the days: Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton in the opening credit sequence of "All in the Family."
I seem to have missed, along with the rest of the popular culture machine, an anniversary which should not have gone unnoticed. Forty years ago, on 12 January 1971, Norman Lear’s situation comedy All in the Family premiered on CBS. The debut episode was prefaced by a nervous on-screen disclaimer:
The program you are about to see is All in the Family. It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter we hope to show, in a mature fashion, just how absurd they are.
The show itself ran for nine years, ending on 8 April 1979. When the show premiered, Carroll O’Connor, who played paterfamilias Archie Bunker to a group including his wife Edith, daughter Gloria and son-in-law Mike Stivic, was only 46 years old; the controversial role itself — a working-class bigot from Astoria, Queens, who never graduated from high school — made both Bunker and the character actor O’Connor household names.
Looking back at the show four decades later (reruns from the show are currently aired nightly on the cable channel TV Land), it is surprising to see just what an achievement All in the Family was — not only in the sit-com form, but in drama as well. In the years since, the dynamics of working-class family relationships and the ways in which the outside culture impinged on the intimacies of this family life have never been as thoroughly scrutinized and dissected. While the later program Roseanne was also a socially-conscious series of comic realism, it couldn’t hold a candle to All in the Family‘s broader scope. Launched in the waning years of the Vietnam War and progressing through the catastrophic Nixon administration, the series demonstrated that Archie and his family, while holed up in the Bunker living room (the location of the program rarely strayed from this single location, and indeed the Smithsonian Institution holds both Archie’s and Edith’s living room chairs in their permanent collection), were affected by not only the war but by racism, sexism, student protests, crime, miscarriage, anti-Semitism, domestic economics, male impotence, sexual violence, homophobia, transgressive sexualities, labor unrest and marital infidelity. As the conservative Archie battled with his progressive son-in-law Mike, the show attracted a huge audience from across the ideological spectrum, Archie’s supporters cheering every time he scored a point against his meathead son-in-law, Mike’s supporters (and show producer Norman Lear, along with most of his writing staff, shared Mike’s progressive politics) enjoying his seemingly incontrovertible put-downs of Archie’s prejudices. All in the Family was #1 in the Nielsen ratings over the five consecutive years 1971-1976, averaging 20 million households per week; when the show ended in 1979, it was ranked #9.
It is also surprising, and rather sad, to see how little the program has aged. In the below clip from the 1973 episode “Archie Is Branded,” an anti-Semitic hate group paints a swastika on the door of the Bunker household in the mistaken belief that the house is still inhabited by its former Jewish owner; this leads to a visit from a representative of a Jewish vigilante group (played by Gregory Sierra, who would shortly join the cast of another fine but forgotten ensemble television comedy, Barney Miller), and a discussion of the danger of violence in political conflict — a discussion which goes on to the present day:
What is also clear to the present-day audience is the remarkable ensemble work that O’Connor, Jean Stapleton as Edith, Sally Struthers as Gloria and Rob Reiner as Mike exhibited through the show’s run. Only the fine performances of the cast (and an excellent writing staff, who each week for nine years created a tightly-structured one-act, one-set play) permitted the supple presentation of the show’s continuing issues. The show itself is constrained by its form — each week, Archie learns a lesson, and each week that lesson is forgotten in the face of the next new “situation” — but still, the characters themselves did develop considerable depth over the years. In the below clip from 1978′s “Two’s a Crowd,” Archie reveals to Mike the grinding poverty of his boyhood and the physical abuse he suffered at the hands of his father:
I don’t want to claim too much for the show. Many episodes of All in the Family were formulaic variations on standard sit-com plots: Archie gets stuck on an elevator or locked in the cellar with only booze for company (though this latter episode was a tour-de-force of solo performance by O’Connor); Edith goes for jury duty or is hired to appear in a television commercial for a laundry detergent — and the program was often too willing to stray to the maudlin, sentimental and melodramatic. It lacks the glorious linguistic pyrotechnics of Yes, Prime Minister and the extraordinary physical farce of Fawlty Towers, two other classics of the genre. But at its best, All in the Family rose above its form and exemplified the finest traditions of American domestic comedy-drama, avoiding (as in the clips above and below) any kind of final moral lessons and willing to leave tensions unresolved at the end of the 22 minute episode; the program approached its themes with a refreshing (especially today) absence of easy snark, sarcasm or irony — it was a show that respected all of its characters and its audience as adults, not arrested adolescents. For me the series’ genuine conclusion was 1978′s season closer “The Stivics Go West,” written by series staff writers Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf, when Mike, Gloria and their young son Joey finally separate from the Bunkers to move to California, breaking up the quartet that had defined the program since its inception. The conclusion of the episode, in which Mike and Archie both express and find it impossible to express their love for each other after seven years of living together, is one of the most memorable and affecting father-son partings in American drama, let alone American television, and though again I don’t want to claim too much for it, it shares with Chekhov’s best scenes a masterly control of misdirection and silence. O’Connor and Stapleton’s bravura, restrained performances come through even in this muddy YouTube clip, on a computer display a mere fraction of the size of the television screen on which it originally appeared:
Thanks, George, for the great post. It has always been my contention that AITF was the single greatest sitcom ever aired on American TV. Looking back now, it is almost unbelivable that such a show could have made it to the air, so lost are we again in the pre-AITF banality of family comedies that in no way reference the wider world, or risk offense in any way. I don’t want to claim too much for the show either, but the clips you reference do highlight what serious turns the show could negotiate without sacrificing laughs. The “Archie is Branded” episode, in particular, almost seems to come from a distant universe, so unlikely is it we will ever see that kind of sitcom writing again.
My pleasure, Ken.
There have been other excellent television comedies since AITF — “The Larry Sanders Show,” the original BBC version of “The Office” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” come immediately to mind — but yes, it was something of a miracle that it appeared when it did, and it would be more of a miracle for something like it to appear again now. The clock has turned back to the 1950s (in color, more leeringly promiscuous and with more pungent language, but the 1950s nonetheless). And to be fair to comedies contemporary to AITF, even those which carried less political baggage, like “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Barney Miller,” seemed far and away more accomplished than current shows and provided their own particular pleasures.
A some mention should be made of the British show All in the Family was based on, Johnny Speight’s Till Death Us Do Part. My (possibly faulty) memory of the respective shows is that while All in the Family may have reached greater emotional peaks, the British show was ruder and more uncompromising. It would be interesting to have another look now and compare the two.
I also think It’s Garry Shandling’s Show is worth a mention when talking about Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Larry Sanders Show. The model for the way those later shows use celebrities (Ricky Gervais’ Extras is another example) as characters playing versions of themselves was pretty much laid down in IGSS, so much so that I don’t think those later shows would exist without it.
True enough, Lear took from British television what he found attractive (as he did with “Sanford and Son,” based on the British show “Steptoe and Son”). “Till Death” never made it to American shores, so I’ll have to bow to those who are familiar with both series.
Actually the use of celebrities as “themselves” in American television comedy has a fairly long history, going back to radio comedy as well. “I Love Lucy,” “The Jack Benny Show” and especially “The Burns & Allen Show” regularly featured performers as guest stars who sportingly mocked their own images. Not to take anything away from Shandling, who twisted this in his own delightful way.
‘Til Death Us Do Part’ was indeed both scandalous and riveting, involving a level of swearing on television which was previously unprecedented but also appropriate to character. I remember enjoying it as a particularly vicious satirical review of current affais in dramatic form. I would like to add a special mention for Warren Mitchell (who played Alf Garnett, who provided the basis for Bunker) whom I later saw give a great portrayal of Davies in THE CARETAKER at the National Lyttleton; and point out that his feckless Labour-supporting son-in-law was well played by Anthony Booth, who went on to become the father-in-law of Tony Blair: make of that what you will!
I was certainly aware that the use of celebrities playing themselves pre-dates Shandling, but my point was that it is his particular twist on the tradition that’s enduring. That’s what I meant when I said he laid down the model. There are a number of instances where the tone and character of the use of that device in IGSS, the looseness of the acting style and even specific riffs and story beats could easily be transplanted into a show like “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (and vice versa) even though the shows were made about twenty years apart. One can’t imagine doing that with eps of IGSS and “I Love Lucy” made twenty years apart. (My memory doesn’t stretch back to those other shows so I don’t know if I could apply that argument.)
You can check out excerpts of Till Death Us Do Part on You Tube.
Obviously, the language on “All in the Family” was also far saltier than what was permitted on television previously, and not only when it came to racial and cultural groups. In the first season, during a particularly heated and emotional discussion of the Vietnam War, Archie blurted out: “I don’t want to talk about that goddamn war no more!” — the “goddamn” was spoken by O’Connor in the heat of his performance, the word itself not occurring in the script as written. But CBS’s Standards & Practices Department let it pass.
Those were the days, indeed.