Developed for U.S. television by Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, All in the Family debuted on CBS on this date in 1971. I wrote this a few years ago, as part of the Flashback Fridays feature that ran for a time at my former online home. Except for the unfortunate citation of a current resident of State Correctional Institution – Phoenix, I think this all holds up. In the grimness of current presidential politics, reflections on the effect of televised bigotry are perhaps even more pertinent now.   

In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have been watching All in the Family when I was a little kid. But by the time I was old enough to be paying attention, it was already an institution.

Norman Lear had been kicking around Hollywood for awhile when he bought the American remake rights to a BBC sitcom called Till Death Us Do Part. Lear took a couple of unsuccessful swings at reworking the material before he discovered the proper formula, recasting the pivotal supporting roles, and, in a small but important detail, changing the last name of his bigoted protagonist from Justice to Bunker. He went from a word that calls to mind egalitarianism and honor to one with connotations of concrete obstinacy. Irony was shed in favor of truer representation, and it just felt right, in the way of the strongest fictional names.

The irony was already plentiful, anyway. Archie Bunker, the blue-collar worker who casually employed every conceivable ethnic slur in his agitated discourse against the supposed sullying of America by the liberal elite, was the lead character in the show, ostensibly the hero. And yet his hateful rhetoric was about as far removed from the viewpoints of Lear as could be. Similarly, Carroll O’Connor couldn’t have been more different from the role that would define the remainder of his career. The show intended to generate its comedy from the satire of the character, demonstrating how his prejudice derived from ignorance and foolishness, but without making him a heartless monster. He was lovable in his way, weirdly charming, and, the show being a comedy, often quite funny. Archie’s lefty son-in-law may have been voicing the same opinions that Lear himself expressed when he was given a podium, a microphone, and an attentive audience, but that didn’t mean the show’s creators intended upon giving that character, or any character, a mere straw man to bat down. The construction of the show was even-handed enough that the first episode was preceded by a warning that explained to viewers the intent of illustrating the absurdity of Archie’s mindset.

So why was it probably a mistake that this show was a staple of my childhood years? Because I undoubtedly didn’t understand all that when I was a little kid. I just saw Archie say terrible things and heard the live studio audience laugh. There was an intricacy to the show that eluded me at the time, that I couldn’t have been expected to know when my age was in the single digits. Still, there I sat, in front of the console TV set the size of a washing machine, and giggled away. I was especially amused when the toilet audibly flushed. It was only much, much later when I watched it that I understood and appreciated the real goals of the show, the daring of its execution.

I’m not saying I was scarred by this, or that I operate today with any confusion about whether or not “Polack” is a nice word. But I am a little curious about how the series was really viewed by all those people who made it the number one rated show for five years running. If a significant number of right-wingers think The Colbert Report is real, then surely there may have been a unsettling percentage of the twenty million people who tuned into All in the Family each week to admire Archie’s straight-talkin’ ways. It’s easy to get paranoid and see the program as a sitcom version of one of Howard W. Campbell, Jr.’s radio essays in Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, the caustic message more impactful than the code it hides.

When Bill Cosby presided over a family sitcom that has its own impressive run atop the Nielsen charts, he notably complained that Archie Bunker never apologized for any of the things he said. Even if he occasionally faced his comeuppance, he never truly had an epiphany about the wrong-headed nature of his views. Though it would have been a betrayal of the artistic vision of the series, potentially undoing its bold honestly with a single line of dialogue, I do see Cosby’s point. I can watch All in the Family now and find it funny, occasionally bordering on brilliant. But when I think of the much younger version of myself watching it, trying to puzzle out its purpose, the laughs sometimes catch in my throat.