Growing up my Dad’s favorite show was All In the Family. He loved how Archie gave it to the meathead.
I still watch the old reruns. I love how they argued politics, racial issues, gender issues, and I wonder, could they ever have a show like this again?
It seems that nowadays its a given that all the races live in harmony, everyone gets along, and they rarely even discuss the current president.
What do you all think?
Were we watching the same show as your Dad? Because I recall the writers made certain that Archie always came up short in his arguments, and the basic joke was that he was the buffoon for expressing his ideas.
It feels like the new comedies are trying to include this type of topical humor. Black-ish, Fresh Off the Boat, Modern Family for its portrayal of Cam and Mitch, etc.
If Black-ish can pull off an episode featuring discussion of the n-word, it reminds me of Archie trying to make the bowling team or getting kissed by Sammy Davis, Jr.
No, there were episodes where Meathead was made to look like the close minded person. Watch the episode “Games the Bunkers Play” where Lionel calls out Meathead for always treating him as a token black person.
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I love how they argued politics, racial issues, gender issues, and I wonder, could they ever have a show like this again?
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Well, there’s South Park.
This review disagrees with that: Archie Bunker and America’s Argument Around the Dinner Table | PopMatters
Not really, Archie was wrong more often, if for no better reason than he was actually suppose to be academically challenged and not really all that bright and as we learned grew up dirt poor and somewhat abused. But “Meathead” was often portrayed as wrong without these excuses. He was nearly a straw man liberal at times. It was Edith who was no genius, living somewhere in the middle between the pair of men politically and socially that usually showed the most wisdom on the show.
The fact that Archie’s prejudices were extremely realistic and Mike Stivic didn’t fall all the way to straw man was the magic that made the show work. I think most of us knew people like Archie back in those days. He wasn’t a caricature, he was a fairly honest character.
I had a great uncle enough like Archie to be the old guy people tried to avoid at family gatherings.
The show was excellent quality, the characters felt pretty realistic, more so than most TV characters in fact. It was never the most funny show but was the top show for 5 years running for combination of comedy and drama that made up the dynamic of this classic sitcom.
The generational argument is used often in sitcoms, so All in the Family is more unique in having it be the primary focus of the show (at least for several seasons).
To expand on this:
Edith often seemed like the dumbest person on the show, but in some ways she was the wisest.
Archie was not prejudiced because he was malicious; he was prejudiced because he was ignorant. As the show goes along, you can see some of his attitudes change.
I can’t think of any examples at the moment, but there are several episodes that show that both Mike and George Jefferson were just as prejudiced as Archie, just in different ways.
Despite the way that Archie often treated Edith, there were plenty of moments that clearly showed how much he loved her. On things that really mattered to her, he would yell and stamp, but would usually give in.
George wasn’t just occasionally as bad as Archie, he was pretty much the counterpart to Archie, albeit a bit more focused on white folk in his prejudice, rather than the wide-ranging misapprehensions Archie had - it carried over to when the Jeffersons got their own show, too. Louise and Lionel were to him what Edith and Gloria were to Archie.
But, yeah, Mike, while generally better, could be as bad sometimes - and even occasionally showed himself to have the same prejudices as Archie, much to his horror. (Though, like you, I maddeningly can’t remember any specific examples.)
Mike was often a jerk in his own right. There was a first-season episode in which Gloria was talking about women’s lib. She reasonably assumed Mike would take her side. Instead, he got very testy and said “Yeah, I read the articles you showed me, but that doesn’t mean I buy the whole bag…I don’t believe in a woman opening up her big mouth around the house!” This lead to a heated discussion in which Mike was both aggressive and condescending, calling Gloria a “wind-up doll.” So the “wind-up doll” stormed out to stay at a friend’s house. I don’t blame her; he really seemed like the liberal mask was coming off, and the next step would be to smack her to keep her in line.
There were several episodes like that. Another one had Mike hosting a friend of his from college, and shooing Gloria away because (he thought) she wasn’t up to their speed. (He changed his tune when the friend beat him at chess three out of three.) And further on, when Gloria was pregnant and fired from the department store when she started to show, Mike went with her to the store manager’s office and almost immediately went off the rails. Shouting, getting in the guy’s face, knocking over a chair…Maybe that wasn’t arrest-worthy in 1977, but it sure would be today.
Actually, the inspiration for Cartman supposedly came from Archie Bunker. They knew an exact replica of him wouldn’t fly with modern audiences, but put his personality into a fat eight year old, and . . .
I was working with an arch-conservative at the time. Although he agreed with Archie on every topic, he bemoaned the fact that Archie (and his views) were made to look foolish.
Michael isn’t always right, but that’s not what the OP said. It said that Archie constantly “gave it” to Meathead. But, more often than not (by a large margin), the show depicted Archie as being wrong in those situations. MIke’s bad traits mostly came out in other situations. Only occasionally was there a role reversal where Archie correctly chastises his son-in-law.
As for Cartman–Archie Bunker may have been their inspiration, but the characters are not remotely alike. Archie was a sympathetic character–his bigotry only came from his ignorance, and caused him misery. The message of the show is actually that you can be a bigot and still be a good person at heart. You just need to learn.
Cartman is just a jerk that they sometimes want you to root for. And, other times, just a literal cartoon villain, turned up to eleven for comedy. He’s a mixture between Dr. House and the characters on Drawn Together.
There was one episode where both Mike and Gloria get fed up with a couple of their hippie friends. It was the episode where this unmarried couple try to stay overnight at the Bunker house but Archie wont allow unmarrieds to sleep together. The woman wont speak (she talks only with her eyes) and soon Gloria gets tired of the game and both her and Mike just want the 2 to bend a little to Archies rules.
I checked it was episode 1:7 “Mike’s Hippie Friends Come to Visit”.
And sometimes I really sympathize where Mike is a freeloader. He seems to little around the house except eat, sleep with Gloria, and argue with Archie.
Haha very true. I loved The Bunkers however in response to the original question, I think in today’s society we will likely not see any other shows similar to the Bunkers or Jeffersons or Good Times. There will always be somebody waiting on the sidelines to complain or Sue. It’s sad but true.
A lot of what made the show work was the conventions of television, and the time in which it was happening. Not long before AITF hit the airwaves, Lucy and Ricky couldn’t sleep in the same bed or use the word “pregnant.”
Now all of a sudden, we can talk about Edith’s menopause or black neighbors or Nixon and Watergate or whatever. And more than that, rather than just using it for shock value, we could use it to produce well written, smart comedy, with three dimensional characters. Archie wasn’t a bad guy; by his own lights, and by the society in which he grew up, he was a stand-up guy, the picture of the Silent Majority. And yet the show could demonstrate how his thinking was getting left behind by a changing society, and his less than happy reactions to it.
I dunno that we could do anything like this again. Our society changes fast enough now that it seems like every ten years, we have to get accustomed to a whole new paradigm…
I seem to remember one Rashomon-type episode where Archie and Mike argued about some repairmen and whether one (Black) had a large knife (Archie) or no knife (Mike) Turns out there was a small knife so Archie was less wrong. “Everyone tells the Truth” season 3.
I don’t know if you could really have such an impact-making show today because that era is was stifled in story telling. The first episode I saw was the 12th “Success Story” where Archie and his WWII buddies have a party for one of their members who is rich. Archie and his pals think he’s doing great but he confesses to Mike that his son won’t have anything to do with him and he’s miserable. But he doesn’t tell Archie so they go on believing. I don’t think any previous show, especially a popular one, would have that story. They get the two together and have a cheerful, tearful reunion.
I don’t know about that. It seems to me that Hollywood still can, and does, produce shows that can take on hot-button issues the way All In The Family did.
Roseanne, for example, was one of the few post-Norman Lear sitcoms to realistically deal with poverty and working-class families. From the few episodes I’ve seen of it, Mom tries for a realistic look at alcoholism and recovery. And while Black-ish is a bit more in the classic “wacky hijinks” sitcom range, it does address racial issues like “acting white” and the effect of absentee fathers. It’s the only show I’ve ever seen that explored the idea behind the word “bougey”.
I agree Roseanne was a kind of attempt at another AITF but had Roseanne in the Archie role. Although I never found the show that funny. Plus while they always said they were poor they always seemed to have money for whatever they wanted.