On January 12, 1971 – fifty years ago next week – Norman Lear’s revolutionary sitcom All In The Family debuted. There was literally nothing like it on American TV at the time, and it was quite a shocking departure from Green Acres or whatever family friendly show it replaced. I remember my family never missing an episode when I was a kid. I had cool parents.
I broke out my DVDs of the first season of All In The Family tonight and watched the series premiere. It’s been at least ten years since I watched that show, and given that we’ve had Archie Bunker’s more evil twin as President for the last four years, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it. Surprisingly, Carroll O’Connor and Norman Lear’s comedic genius is just as relevant now as it was fifty years ago. No two ways about it, Archie Bunker is a bigoted asshole, but he’s funny. In spite of myself, I laughed until I had tears in my eyes. The thing is, I was laughing AT Archie, not with him. Played to perfection by O’Connor, and based on Norman Lear’s own father, Archie is not a sympathetic character, and I hear echoes of Archie’s rhetoric in the worst of today’s political dialogue, especially on social media, where Trump supporting politicians and commentators bloviate, and anonymous incel keyboard warriors reign. Jean Stapleton is equally as funny as Archie’s long-suffering wife Edith, and – at least in this episode – she isn’t the pushover that I remembered her being later on in the series.
Archie represents the worst of the Nixon era – ignorant, uninformed, and bigoted. Lear never meant for Archie Bunker to be a role model (I hear sympathetic nonsense occasionally from people who seem to be nostalgic for Archie’s racial epithets, not realizing that Lear wrote them as ironic commentary on Archie’s ignorance), and Carroll O’Connor (who was politically liberal in real life) was just a really good actor who made Archie believable. The first few seasons of All In The Family hold up well both as comedy and social commentary, but neither Norman Lear nor Carroll O’Connor meant for Archie to be a modern day politically incorrect anti-hero, either. Archie Bunker is an ignorant bigot whose attitudes are sadly still with us today, fifty years later.
