The Popularity of the Television Program All in the Family Can Be Attributed to Its
The Show That Changed Idiot box Forever
All in the Family was the get-go programme to genuinely reckon with the cultural upheaval of 1960s America. Television receiver would never be the same.
Adapted from Rock Me on the Water, HarperCollins Publishers, 2021.
Due westhen CBS first placed All in the Family on the air, on Jan 12, 1971, it irrevocably transformed tv. Afterward a shaky first season in which it struggled to find an audience, the show prospered, rising to get No. 1 in the ratings for five consecutive years, a record unmatched at the time. All in the Family commanded national attending to a degree almost incommunicable to imagine in today'south fractionated entertainment mural. Archie Bunker'south catchwords—stifle, meathead, and dingbat—all became national shorthand. Scholars earnestly debated whether the testify punctured or promoted bigotry.
Its success non just helped elevator The Mary Tyler Moore Evidence, M*A*South*H, and the other great topical comedies of the early 1970s, merely besides cemented the idea that television could be used to comment meaningfully on the society effectually it—an thought the networks had uniformly rejected throughout all the upheaval of the 1960s. That legacy—the determination to connect the medium to the moment—reverberates through shows every bit diverse equally Fleabag, Atlanta, Breaking Bad, The Wire, and countless others. The night that CBS initially aired All in the Family was the first step on the road toward the Peak Tv set that we are living through today.
All in the Family condensed the "generation gap" of the 1960s into a single living room. It pitted Mike Stivic, a long-haired liberal, and his wife, the bubbly Gloria, against Gloria'due south father, Archie Bunker, a reactionary bigot and Richard Nixon–loving dockworker—as Edith, the daffy only chivalrous married woman and female parent, looked on. Incarnated by a stellar bandage and energized by brilliant writing and directing, it became a goggle box landmark, widely lauded as one of the greatest and almost influential shows ever.
Initially, though, it was something of a miracle that All in the Family reached the air at all. Before CBS bought it, ABC had rejected it twice. And before All in the Family, shows that tried to achieve more than relevance had about all failed, mostly because they were as well laden with adept intentions to attract an audience. That All in the Family non but reached the air only prospered was the result of two men: Norman Lear, its staunchly liberal creator, and Robert D. Wood, the conservative president of CBS, who put it on the schedule. That act revolutionized television, but both men were unlikely revolutionaries.
Norman Lear was the son of a man whose dreams dissolved speedily only whose resentments outlived him in the work of his son. Herman Lear was a small-fourth dimension salesman and entrepreneur, and a fountain of dubious get-rich-quick schemes. His wife, Jeanette, according to Norman, was self-absorbed, discontented, and, like her husband, volatile. Later, they would become Lear's early models for Archie and Edith Bunker. Throughout his childhood in Connecticut and Brooklyn, Lear'southward parents immersed him in an environment of barely controlled chaos. The ii of them, Lear would often say, "lived at the ends of their fretfulness and the tops of their lungs." At the elevation of argument, the veins in his neck bulging, Lear's father would trounce his fists against his chest and blare at Lear'south female parent, "Jeanette, stifle yourself."
Similar many children of the Peachy Depression, Lear found management and structure in the military. After drifting through a few semesters at Emerson Higher, in Boston, he enlisted in the Ground forces Air Force following Pearl Harbor and flew dozens of bombing missions over Germany. Afterward a few years working as a Broadway printing agent and, later, for his father, Lear made a decision that proved a turning point: He loaded his married woman and infant girl into a 1946 Oldsmobile convertible and pointed it toward Los Angeles. At that place, he hoped for a fresh start, only struggled to find work. He was reduced to selling piece of furniture and baby photos door-to-door with a man named Ed Simmons, an aspiring one-act author who was the husband of Lear's cousin.
I night, Lear helped Simmons finish a parody of a popular song he had been writing. When they establish a nightclub vocalizer to buy the song, their payday was only $xl between them, merely that was enough to convince the two to drop their salesman's satchels and plunge into a full-time writing partnership. Soon after, they caught the attention of industry insiders and began writing for an early television-variety show.
Through the 1950s, Lear's career advanced in stride with the growth of television itself. These were the years of idiot box's so-called golden historic period, when earnest dramas such as The Philco Television Playhouse groomed a steady stream of young directors for Hollywood. Lear marinated in the other groovy television receiver production of those years: the star-led variety shows, such as Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, that drew on traditions of vaudeville and radio one-act.
Lear thrived in this globe. He began to ricochet between Los Angeles and New York, mastering the breakneck pace of television production—he survived the abiding deadlines, he later on recalled, on Dexedrine to stay awake for all-night writing sessions and Seconal to sleep when they were over. He honed his sense of comedy, arresting the rhythms of sketches that had to quickly grip an audience's attention betwixt singers and dancing acts.
His piece of work was skilled and professional person, and his shows were sufficiently successful to constantly open up new doors for him. Eventually, he and Simmons ended their partnership, and Lear took upwardly with the director Bud Yorkin, with whom he created a product company that developed both idiot box programs and movies for Paramount.
Some of these films (including Come up Blow Your Horn and Divorce American Style) managed respectable box-office returns, but none generated much critical excitement. No reviewers saw in the Lear and Yorkin movies, or their succession of boob tube specials with soft-edged mainstream entertainers, the profile of annihilation new. Looking back, one Hollywood executive described them in those years as "yeoman producers, just guys that would get their heads down and do the work." Little of Lear's work in the 1960s signaled that he had much to say well-nigh the way America was transforming around him. "Here's an case, and it rarely happens, of a guy who was smarter than his career," recalled Michael Ovitz, a co-founder of Creative Artists Agency. "Norman Lear was far more intellectually skillful than the things he was doing."
Within a few years, millions would agree, but not until Lear met another World War 2 veteran who was an fifty-fifty more unlikely candidate to transform the nature of television.
The career of Robert D. Wood, the CBS executive who ultimately put All in the Family on the air, proceeded nearly exactly in parallel with Lear's. While Lear served in the Army Air Forcefulness during Globe State of war Two, Woods spent iii years in the Navy, including time in the South Pacific. Subsequently the war, he graduated with a caste in advertizing from the University of Southern California in 1949, the same year Lear arrived in Los Angeles with his immature family.
Wood started his career in ad sales for the CBS radio affiliate in L.A., KNX. By 1960, he'd risen up the ranks to become vice president and manager of the network's local television receiver affiliate. His pinnacle to that role anointed him as a prince in the CBS empire. The affiliate, KNXT, was one of the five Boob tube stations effectually the country that the federal government permitted CBS to own and operate direct during this period. These "O&O stations" were full-bodied in the largest markets and generated enormous profits. CBS granted groovy autonomy to O&O full general managers like Wood and marked them as future leaders. The network also pushed managers to deliver on-air editorials, like those in local newspapers, simply left them almost entirely free to make up one's mind the content.
Wood thrived in this role. "He was really proud of being the editorial voice, the guy who appeared in the editorials, and he was adept at it," recalled Pete Noyes, a prominent news producer at KNXT in those years. "He had a bang-up presence." Wood hired Howard Williams, an editorial author from the bourgeois Los Angeles Mirror, to help him develop the station's editorial line.
Wood was a gregarious boss, with a salesman's effortless capacity to brand friends and create camaraderie. He knew everybody's name and had fourth dimension to talk to anyone. "Didn't thing who they were … he was your buddy," Williams said. Wood's politics were consistently conservative, reflecting the centre of gravity in L.A. media and business concern circles during the 1950s and '60s, in which he mingled easily. In 1962 and 1966, respectively, KNXT endorsed Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan for governor. In 1964, when the first demonstrations by the free-speech communication movement erupted at UC Berkeley, Forest, in one of his on-air editorials, called the demonstrators "witless agitators" and insisted that they "be dealt with quickly and severely to set an example for all fourth dimension to those who arouse for the sake of agitation."
A few years later, CBS promoted Forest again, relocating him to the East Declension, where he took on a succession of top-level jobs. In early 1969, Woods was named president of the CBS Idiot box Network, the company's highest-ranking television position.
This promotion placed him atop the virtually powerful and profitable of the three television networks. CBS'south preeminence was symbolized by its imposing Midtown Manhattan headquarters, an ascetic and dramatic spire of charcoal-gray granite known as Blackness Stone. From his 34th-flooring function, Wood entered a Mad Men environment that appeared frozen in time. This was a more urbane, cosmopolitan, and cutthroat globe than the domesticated cycle of Junior League dinners and weekends at the embankment that Forest had left behind in Los Angeles. Just he took to information technology naturally. To many around him, Wood came across as the West Coast equivalent of an Ivy Leaguer, confident and smoothen, if no intellectual; he was e'er more than comfortable discussing football than philosophy.
Only for all the power and profitability that CBS projected through the belatedly '60s, information technology couldn't entirely ignore the social changes of the era. CBS faced disruption from the same demographic-driven transformation of its audition that had staggered the movie studios and sent weekly admissions in movie theaters plummeting through the '50s and '60s. Like Hollywood, the television networks faced a growing disconnection betwixt their musty products and the young Baby Boomers whose swelling numbers and growing ownership power were reshaping the market place for pop culture. And Woods, with his grounding in Los Angeles, felt the tremors earlier than almost anyone else effectually him.
In 1961, Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Committee, disparaged television as "a vast wasteland." But he would have been only as accurate to call it "a vast cornfield."
Through the 1960s, the networks stubbornly looked away from the simultaneous earthquakes disrupting American life: the ceremonious-rights and antiwar movements, the nightly carnage of Vietnam, the rise of the drug culture, the sexual revolution, and the feminist awakening. Instead, they more often than not offered viewers a gauzy, pastoral vision of America.
With only 3 networks, shows needed to attract enormous viewership to survive. The prevailing aim at the networks and the advertisement agencies was to produce what became known as "the least objectionable program" that could describe the most diverse viewership. In practice, this translated into shows that would be adequate not but to urban sophisticates but also to pocket-sized-town traditionalists. So, off the CBS associates line flowed a procession of banal comedies jubilant the elementary wisdom of rural life, including The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show. Surrounding them were multifariousness shows and comedies led by aging figures from the '50s and even earlier, such every bit Ed Sullivan and Lucille Ball. Each nighttime, CBS chronicled the tumultuous strains trigger-happy at America on Walter Cronkite'southward newscast and so spent the next three and a one-half hours of prime time trying to erase them from viewers' minds.
CBS'south first attempt to reverberate the changing culture came in 1967, when information technology premiered The Smothers Brothers One-act Hour. The Smothers Brothers, Tom the leader and Dick the straight man, were a modestly successful duo who had built an audition through albums and a nightclub human activity that combined stand-up comedy with gentle parodies of folk music. Their testify was a hitting from the outset and quickly became the one spot on television set that seemed conscious of the burgeoning youth civilisation. Cutting-edge bands such as Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, The Who, and Simon and Garfunkel all appeared.
As the show's audition grew, Tom Smothers in detail became determined to use the platform to evangelize a distinctly liberal message about contemporary problems, specially the Vietnam War. Tom said, "In that location's no point of being on idiot box … at this signal in time, with what's going on in this land, and not reverberate what's going on," recalled Rob Reiner, the future All in the Family unit star, who joined the bear witness for part of its last season as a writer. CBS censors predictably recoiled, snipping lines from some segments and rejecting others completely. The show had supporters inside CBS, but the network'southward senior leadership grew weary of the abiding arguments. Forest canceled the show in early on April 1969, less than two months afterwards he'd causeless the network's presidency.
The cancellation underscored the difficulty of changing CBS. But pressure for a new arroyo was building, and it came, surprisingly, from the network'south business staff. CBS had the biggest audiences, just ABC and NBC were successfully wooing advertisers with their arguments that they had meliorate audiences: young, affluent consumers in urban centers. "It was the sales department that said if we want to be competitive, nosotros ought to try to get a younger profile with our audience," said Gene Jankowski, a CBS advert executive who afterwards became the network's president.
Wood had not been elevated to the presidency with a mission to transform the network. He arrived with no announced mandate or vision; nor did he hope to leave his mark on the civilization. He didn't talk virtually the network as a public trust; he saw it, unsentimentally, mostly as a vehicle to sell soap and cars. Michael Ovitz, then a immature agent, recalled that no one in the creative community looked to Wood for insight. "He never read a script," Ovitz said. "And if he did, no one cared what he had to say virtually information technology." Neither did Wood feel whatsoever urge to provide a platform for the new voices and social movements agitating for change: Even after he moved to more liberal New York City, his politics remained anchored well right of center. Irwin Segelstein, a top CBS programming executive, later said of Wood, "Bob is really Archie Bunker. The radical-right Irish conservative."
But the advert section found Wood receptive to its arguments for a new direction. I twenty-four hours in February 1970, Wood came to the sales department and said that CBS had to get younger in its programming and its audience. Privately, he told CBS executives that he feared losing the younger generation to the edgy new movies emerging from Hollywood, like Easy Passenger. "A sure genre of films were pulling young people away," Woods said afterward. "I sensed a shift in the national mood." Wood knew he needed a program that would make a loud statement in lodge to attract new viewers. He "wanted to go some show that would cause some conversation," recalled Perry Lafferty, the one-time managing director and producer serving as CBS'due south vice president for programming in Hollywood. Norman Lear, during the first 2 decades of his show-business organisation career, had displayed neither much interest nor much facility in generating conversation, merely Lear would provide Wood exactly what he was looking for, and then some.
All in the Family began every bit a British boob tube evidence titled Till Decease United states of america Practise Office, the story of a working-form bigot, his sharp-tongued wife, their daughter, and her married man. It caused a sensation in Britain for its frank treatment of racism and other previously taboo topics, and its potential every bit a template for an American evidence seemed obvious. But when CBS tried to acquire the American rights to Till Death, it discovered that they had already been sold to Norman Lear.
The material had instantly detonated with Lear: The battles between the bigoted male parent and the liberal son-in-law reminded him of his own struggles with his male parent, Herman. In belatedly summer 1968, he acquired the rights to the projection and secured a contract from ABC to develop a pilot.
Lear did not begin adapting Till Decease with whatsoever ambition to transform television. "I accept never, ever remembered thinking, Oh, we're doing something outlandish, riotously different," he recalled. "I wasn't on whatever mission. And I don't think I knew I was breaking such footing. I didn't picket Petticoat Junction, for Chrissake. I didn't lookout Beverly Hillbillies. I didn't know what I was doing." To the extent that he had an ulterior motive, it was more than financial than artistic: Lear was attracted to owning a situation one-act that would provide a lasting stream of revenue if it were syndicated for reruns.
Lear moved quickly to write, cast, and film a airplane pilot for the show, which he initially called Justice for All. He relocated the setting from London to Queens. For Archie and Edith, he chose Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton. Neither was a household proper noun, but both had worked steadily: O'Connor had been a character player in dozens of movies and television shows through the '60s, and Stapleton had worked on Broadway and in idiot box. Lear bandage two lesser-known younger actors every bit Mike and Gloria, and shot a pilot in tardily September 1968. ABC, however, rejected it—as well as a second, redo pilot he shot a year afterward.
Lear's agent pushed the concept to CBS. Woods was initially hesitant, only soon recognized that he had found his conversation starter. He later explained his thinking to the sociologist Todd Gitlin: "I actually thought the airplane pilot was very, very funny … Information technology certain seemed to me a terrific manner to examination this whole attitude about the network." Merely a twelvemonth after Wood buried the Smothers Brothers, he gave new life to Archie Bunker.
Fifty-fifty with Forest's support, the prove faced formidable headwinds inside CBS. William Paley, the autocratic chairman of the board, hated it from the outset, considering it vulgar. But Wood was determined. "Bob Woods had balls," said James Rosenfield, an ad salesman at the time who went on to go the president of CBS. "He really had balls, and what I never understood to this day was how that happened, because Bob Woods came out of sales. He didn't accept whatever clout with the Hollywood community. He didn't know Norman Lear, but he understood that in that location was an opportunity here for significant change in the medium, and he made it happen."
With the go-ahead from CBS, Lear reshaped the cast with new choices for the younger roles. For Gloria, the Bunkers' daughter, he chose Sally Struthers, a young blonde whom Lear had seen on the Smothers Brothers and in the movie Five Piece of cake Pieces. For Mike, the son-in-law, Lear looked closer to home, casting Rob Reiner, the son of his longtime friend Carl Reiner. In addition to his writing for the Smothers Brothers, the younger Reiner, with long hair and unabashedly liberal views, had become the go-to casting pick for the industry'due south stilted first attempts to acknowledge the changing youth culture, on private episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies and Gomer Pyle. "I was similar the resident Hollywood hippie," Reiner said later.
For the director, Lear chose John Rich, a skilled tv veteran whom he had met two decades earlier. Coincidentally, Rich had been approached at almost exactly the same fourth dimension to direct The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which preceded All in the Family on the air at CBS past four months. While Mary was pathbreaking in its own, quieter style—illustrating the changing roles of women in American society through deft and affectionate character studies—to Rich the show didn't appear nearly every bit revolutionary as Lear's project. "Information technology was 1970, and the dialogue that was written so just blew me away," Rich remembered. "And I called Norman … I said, 'You aren't going to make this, are you?' He said, 'Aye.' I said, 'Is anybody going to put it on?' He said, 'They say they will.'"
Rich's uncertainty, even incredulity, was widely shared. Even with CBS's approval, the show'south hereafter always seemed tenuous to the cast and crew as they worked toward their January 1971 premiere. "We knew we were doing something good, but we didn't call up anybody was going to go for this," Reiner remembered. O'Connor was then skeptical that the bear witness would survive that he held on to the charter for the flat in Rome where he had been living and fabricated Lear promise to pay for a showtime-form ticket dorsum if the show was canceled.
Lear, too, felt that CBS's commitment was but conditional. Yep, Wood had bought the show, but he remained skittish about information technology. "He wanted to take a gamble, merely he fought me tooth and smash," Lear remembered. Forest and CBS were simply uncertain that a show this different from their usual programming would find an audition. "That's all they worried about," Lear said. "It's as uncomplicated every bit 'We don't know if this works.' Nosotros know the Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction—nosotros know that works. Nosotros don't know if this works." During the filming of an early episode, Rich was in the control room when Forest stopped by the fix. "I hope yous know what you're doing," he told the manager, "because my rump is on the line here." Only weeks before the bear witness was scheduled to air, CBS still had failed to sell whatever advertising to air with it.
From the start, Lear participated in an unrelenting push and pull with the CBS censors over the show's language and content. The network's caution was axiomatic in the time slot it selected for the testify: Tuesday, a night it didn't view as pivotal, at nine:30 p.thou., between Hee Haw and the CBS News Hour. In advance of the premiere, Wood sent a telegram to CBS affiliates quoting a spoken communication he'd delivered the previous spring: "Nosotros have to broaden our base," he wrote. "We have to concenter new viewers. We're going to operate on the theory that it is amend to try something new than not to try information technology and wonder what would take happened if nosotros had."
CBS even developed an unusual disclaimer to appear just before the show's first episode, explaining that All in the Family "seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to prove—in a mature way—just how absurd they are." To the cast, the disclaimer "was ridiculous, because they're putting the show on the air, and yet they're trying to distance themselves from the show at the same time," Reiner remembered.
CBS's ambivalence crystallized into a unmarried pick: which episode to air first. Lear wanted to start with the third version of the airplane pilot, which he had taped with the new cast. Viewed even decades later on, the episode is explosive. Summoning painful memories, viscerally connected to his characters, Lear, then in his mid-40s, found in his script a passionate and urgent voice he had never before tapped. Inside minutes, Archie is raging against "your spics and your spades"; complaining nigh "Hebes" and "Blackness beauties"; calling Edith a "silly dingbat" and telling her to "stifle" herself; and describing Mike as a "dumb Polack" and "the laziest white man I've ever seen"—the latter a reprise of an insult that Herman Lear used to direct at his son. Mike, only every bit heatedly, is blaming crime on poverty and insisting that he and Gloria see no evidence that God exists. In the opening scene, Archie and Edith arrive domicile early from church building and take hold of Mike kissing Gloria amorously equally he carries her toward the bedroom. Archie is scandalized: "11:10 on a Sunday morning," he grumbles in his thick Queens patois.
This was all a bit much for CBS, specially the "Sunday morn" line—which clearly suggested that the young couple was on their way to have sexual activity (during daylight, no less). The network insisted that Lear take it out; he refused. Wood offered a compromise: The line could stay in if Lear agreed to push the pilot episode back to the second calendar week and run the projected second show kickoff. Lear refused again. He believed the pilot episode presented "Archie in full," with all his prejudices and animosities on open up display. Ambulation it was like jumping into the deep terminate of a pool; CBS and Lear together would "go fully wet the starting time fourth dimension out," equally Lear later described it. In what would become a common occurrence, Lear told Wood he would quit if CBS started with the 2nd episode.
On January 12, 1971, the date that All in the Family unit was scheduled to announced for the first fourth dimension, Rich and the coiffure were performing a apparel rehearsal for the flavor'due south sixth episode in the CBS circuitous known as Television Metropolis, at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Artery in Los Angeles. Only earlier half dozen:30 California fourth dimension, they crowded into Rich'southward small command room, where they could watch a network feed as the bear witness's 9:xxx eastern airtime approached. They might have caught the last minutes of Hee Haw, a last vestige of television receiver's obsession with rural audiences, before the control room filled with the disembodied voice reading CBS's strange disclaimer. Then came the sounds of Jean Stapleton at the pianoforte as she and Carroll O'Connor sang the bear witness'southward nostalgic theme song, "Those Were the Days." Still, it wasn't clear yet which episode CBS had placed on the air. Within moments came the image of Mike pursuing Gloria in the kitchen and her parents arriving home early from church, the initial scenes of the pilot. The CBS centre had blinked. Television's search for a new audience had finally torn down the curtain separating it from the tumultuous changes unfolding around it. Through that opening would emerge some of the greatest television ever made.
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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/03/how-all-family-changed-american-tv-forever/618353/
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