Oh, I hated him in that episode. Another was when he was riding Archie as a near criminal about bringing home work equipment and petty theft from his job but then when caught defrauding the phone company he said something like “I’m a victim of the same mentality”.
While I’ve never come to share Archie’s views on race and guns and religion and the greatness of Richard L. Nixon, I definitely have come to appreciate him more in some other ways, a key one being that he is entitled to respect in his own house, and Meathead was disrespectful. The brilliance of the show is that Mike v. Archie is not portrayed as G v E, and while both characters are very fully developed and relatable and likable and unlikable individuals they’re also symbolic of the generations, including the financial dependence of the hippie generation on the one it railed against and the bitterness and hard lessons of the Depression/WW2 (I hate the term “Greatest Generation”, but you know what I mean) against what they perceived as the softness and sloth of the younger generation, and the hypocrisies and virtues of each.
Brilliant show that never jumped the shark imo.
And disagree on Gloria being a dumb blonde: I thought she was one of the sharpest and most likable and “practical smarts” character on the show, a good synthesis of the best traits of her parents and husband.
I mean there are people that think Huck Finn is a racist screed, there are people that think Blazing Saddles is a racist comedy and laugh at the wrong parts.
I almost found Meathead more annoying than Archie, and sometimes more cringe inducing. I too found myself wanting to visit violence on Meathead, seemed like they went out of their way to make him unlikable.
Watching the first seasons again on DVD recently, one of the things I noticed is how Gloria grows and matures. When we first meet her, she’s this curly-headed girl who says “Yeah,” a lot when Michael says something or echoes his political opinions. You can imagine that he’s the first guy she ever met who talked that way and his high-sounding ideas are part of what made him attractive to her. But she begins to develop ideas and opinions of her own that are sometimes contrary to his, especially where sex and gender roles are concerned. Mike, after all, could be a chauvinist pig.
It failed due to the fact that Archie, for all his unthinking biogtry, the only positive character on the show. Edith was a moron, Gloria didn’t do much but whine in an incredibly grating voice and everything negative Archie believed about Meathead was right. Who else was there to like?
Archie was a hard-working man brought up with the values of his day who (granted) rarely overcame the bad aspects of those values but had positive stuff too. Meathead, in theory, the voice of the rational liberal early on was a lazy, shiftless lout sponging off his father-in-law and then having the unmitigated temerity to attack his host while mooching off him.
Archie, for all his unthinking (and while destructive, non-mean spirited*) bigotry–and he was a bigot, no doubt about it, had positive traits. Meathead had none.
Lear’s big mistakes were A) making Archie just a cranky grandpa type. Yeah, he uses the “N” word, but he was brought up to think of the term as just what “those people” were called and not a big deal. You’d have to make him somewhat more racist and B) Giving us a positive liberal character to contrast(Lionel Jefferson filled that role nicely until he spun off into his own show). As it was, the message was “Decent people can be unthinkingly bigoted but don’t really mean any harm, but all liberals are douchebags” and that’s not what Lear intended
*There was an (early?) ep where someone tried to get Archie to join the Klan or a Klan analog and Archie was horrified and refused. Archie absolutely was a bigot and a racist in the “They’re different/inferior to us” way but not in a “Burn a cross on their lawn” type way.
But the episode you are looking for is called “Archie and the KKK.” Of course back then they didn’t publicize what the episode title was so you had to wait for the reveal. Archie writes a letter to the editor about crime and the attitudes that are causing it or something like it. A couple of guys at the bar hear him talking about it and like the cut of his jib. They invite him to a meeting of like minded people called the Qweens council of Crusaders. When he gets to the meeting the first clue he doesn’t pick up on is that the sign says Kweens Kouncil of Krusaders. Then when the meeting begins the hoods go on and cue a classic Archie expression.
I think the bid disparity between Mike and Archie is mostly because Carroll O’Connor acts rings around Rob Reiner (as did Jean Stapleton). Reiner has stated that he got a lot of his work because unlike other actors who looked like and belonged to the counter culture, he showed up on time, knew his lines and wasn’t high. Archie grew because of the nuanced performance. Mike never really did. Archie was a brilliant character study of a complex character.
What I found surprising was how much trouble O’Connor had with the character from beginning to end. According to Lear they fought over just about every script.
At times it was about how people’s beliefs often follow from what’s in their own best interest, whether they’ll admit this or not, and how real life can sometimes expose hypocrisy.
In one episode (I may not have the details exactly right so feel free to correct me) Mike was a candidate for a teaching position at a University in another part of the country. Archie was not happy about this because his daughter would be moving away if Mike got the job.
Eventually it came down to two candidates, Mike and another man, who happened to be black. The other man got the job, possibly because of affirmative action, and Mike ranted angrily about how he should have gotten the job because he was (at least in his mind) more qualified. But Archie was suddenly all for affirmative action and was throwing Mike’s past statements on the subject back at him.
This thread reminds me of my high school senior English class, way back when.
It was the school’s honors English class, which meant, at least in theory that we were the smartest, most advanced, best prepared students in a fairly large suburban high school.
Somewhere in the middle of the year, our assignment was Swift’s A Modest Proposal.
And no one got it. The archetype of satire in the English language.
I was surprised to learn (many years ago) that O’Connor, in spite of being a baby faced Irish-American, was from a very patrician background: his father was wealthy and his brothers were doctors and he had a car and driver taking him to private school when he was a boy. Makes his impersonation of Archie (and the “Shoe-Booty” episode, which he largely wrote and improvised) all the more impressive- he wasn’t drawing on his own experience for the blue collar background.
I remember reading that quote before and being puzzled about Mike supposedly being bisexual, until I recalled the episode referred to. A friend of Mike’s whom Archie perceived as effeminate visited the house, sparking off the topic of that week. Nixon, who was probably not a regular viewer, must have confused this character with the son-in-law.
You’re forgetting those who are in between, who, in the U.S., are probably the majority. They don’t know what they think. But they were curious about what this “Colbert thing” was all about so they checked it out. As I recall, according to polls, a lot of people only got interested in “news” after starting to view Colbert or the Daily Show.
I specifically talked about that episode in post #18. Nixon didn’t have to be a regular viewer. That episode was from the 1st season. Only the 5th episode to air. No one knew the characters well. And they chose the 5th episode of a show to put on the first openly gay character in a sitcom. Talk about ballsy.
True enough. But none of his other shows have held up as well. Mostly I think because of the acting of Carroll O’Connor. Most of his other shows are pretty much unwatchable.
I think Good Times comes closest. I agree that most of the rest are either hopelessly dated or kind of handled clumsily. There was a lot of anvil-dropping in One Day At A Time.