ALL IN THE CENTURY
A Hundred Reasons to Celebrate a TV Innovator
In his 2014 memoir Even This I Get To Experience, producer Norman Lear wrote the following about his television-changing career-defining 1970s series All in the Family:
I’ve never heard that anybody conducted his or her life differently after seeing an episode of All in the Family. If two thousand years of the Judeo-Christian ethic hadn’t eradicated bigotry and intolerance, I didn’t think a half-hour sitcom was going to do it. Still, as my grandfather was fond of saying — and as physicists confirm — when you throw a pebble in a lake the water rises. It’s far too infinitesimal for our eyes to register, so all we can see is the ripple. People still say to me, ‘We watched Archie as a family and I’ll never forget the discussions we had after that show.’ And so that was the ripple of All in the Family. Families talked.”
In shocked whispers perhaps, at first. After all, some of the topics explored on the show weren’t exactly dinner-table appropriate, especially in 1971 — s-e-x, for instance, which was front-and-center in the first episode.
And the talking wasn’t always of the friendly give-and-take flavor, either. Like those under Archie’s roof, the members of the families tuning in to All in the Family often held strongly opposing viewpoints on issues of the day that were covered. Race, politics, religion.
But they did talk. More and more (and less and less furtively) as the slow-to-start series exploded into TV’s biggest hit. Of any kind. On any network. In any living-room. Intolerance and bigotry. Homosexuality. Racial epithets and swastikas. Gender politics. Rape. Pre-marital, post-marital, extra-marital sex. No taboo went un-smashed.
Even the younger among the 50 million watching each week talked, if a bit cluelessly, curious as they were about words and ideas they heard on the show that they weren’t schooled in yet. Gloria’s miscarriage, for example. What fag or lez or wife-swapping mean. Why Archie got so confused in one episode when Edith was dealing with something called The Change. (“What is she changing into?”)
It was all worlds away from TV’s beginnings. But then that was the point: The world itself had changed by 1970. TV had to start reflecting that, speaking to it, if it were to survive.
The ripple that was All in the Family survived the entirety of the decade it transformed. Two hundred five episodes over nine seasons from January 1971 through the spring of 1979 that took talking — both on-screen and off — to levels it had rarely known. Take for instance, a two-part episode that aired in late December 1977, just shy of seven years on the air, when you’d think the comedy would have no more envelopes to push. “Edith’s Crisis of Faith” not only tackled the topic of religion, it questioned the purpose of God.
At Christmas.
The incident that brought on Edith Bunker’s depression-fueled crisis — the gay-bashing death of crossdressing friend Beverly LaSalle (hold your memes of outrage: it’s how the topic was addressed in 1977, with purpose) — was trailblazing in its own right. Yet it was almost incidental to the bigger issue explored: fervent church-going Edith’s anger at a God that would allow it. And her church-going no more.
That it took loud-and-proud-atheist son-in-law Michael Stivic to get her back into the fold, in a skillfully written kitchen-table scene between the two (“Ma, if there is a god, you’re one of the most understanding people he ever made. We need you.”) made it stand out even more. It provided one of the most talk-worthy moments of the series’ long talk-worthy run.
Gay-bashing, transvestitism, and a turning on God that ends up recalibrated by an atheist — all airing on network television, on Christmas Eve. Let’s see that happen today. (Hats off to the current and rightly celebrated Golden Age, but maybe the celebration needn’t always come at the expense if not dismissal of the 1970s TV revolution that placed the pavers?)
With success, the ripple that was All in the Family yielded other ripples, too, in the form of other comedies from Norman Lear. More families talked as a result. About more things. About racism and poverty (explored in episodes of Good Times), about single-parenting and divorce and teenagers sexuality (One Day at a Time), about mixed-race marriages (The Jeffersons), about elder care and mental illness and evangelicalism among a zillion other ideas (Mary Hartman Mary Hartman), about longterm gay partnerships (Hot L Baltimore), about the women’s movement (Maude). Not all of it friendly. But all of it important.
The talking wasn’t limited to projects that came from Lear, either. The doors that All in the Family opened encouraged other comedy writers and producers to rush through, bearing their own reflections of and for a real-er world. Giving viewers still more subjects to think about, weigh in on, discuss. Gun violence and racial profiling and forced retirement (in episodes of Barney Miller), media censorship (WKRP in Cincinnati), openly gay relationships (Soap), xenophobia (Chico and the Man), sexual liberation (Three’s Company), the casualties of war (M*A*S*H). Not all of it easy. But all of it important.
These and other conversations of course went on to fuel the 1980s and 1990s, too, throughout which the genre known as TV comedy was continually re-thought and re-imagined. (Masturbation, anyone?) And then beyond that, as one century welcomed another, sitcoms and their stories — not to mention the technological means for enjoying them — multiplied, along with the discussions. (Thank goodness for Arrested Development: Turns out the majority of real-life families are sane after all.) Comedy verite, mockumentary, went on to change prime-time for its generation as All in the Family did for its own. More and more changes; more and more conversations. Families talked. Among the lot were new comedies from Norman Lear himself, who had projects in each of the five decades, as recently as, well, 2022.
Today, the lake of television is a boundless ocean. Ripples extend in every direction, the yield of creative innovation on display in (literally) hundreds of comedies, even as the definition of word television has become as fluid as the ocean itself. The conversations borne of these in an altogether newly changed world — a search for meaning on an endangered planet, gender identity(s), hashtag revolutions, a state of teenaged ennui that makes 1977’s James at 15 seem like a Disney musical — are being had by the most diverse group of viewers the medium has ever known.
A reasonable hunch, however, would be that Norman Lear himself would wish that they involved more talking than typing. Were more actual than virtual.
Still, today there are reminders of the show that was there at the start, 50 years ago. Three times since 2019, beginning with All in the Family, classic episodes of Lear-produced comedies from the 1970s have been re-made with contemporary casts. Part of what’s now a full-on ABC franchise called Live In Front of a Studio Audience. (Undeniably a hook, the title is likely less a gimmick than a reminder of a key sitcom element missing from TV today, as the multi-camera comedy faces extinction.)
Each has been warmly received by viewers and Emmy voters alike, as well by critics and essayists who’ve noted how the writing from these now decades-old shows — the 1970s scripts have been repurposed verbatim — hold up. How they still have something to say and to talk about. Maybe even more now than then. Good writing evidently can do that.
If reports are accurate, the next Lear classic to be revisited will be All in the Family spin-off Maude. Fittingly, given the summer’s headlines, the episode to be re-made will likely be the controversial two-parter from November 1972 in which 47-year-old Maude Findley, faced with an unplanned pregnancy, opts to have an abortion. That the original episodes aired two months before Roe v. Wade was decided (the procedure was legal in the Findleys’ New York State in 1972) seems to make “Maude’s Dilemma” a franchise gimme.
If it’s done — and it’s a sizable if, since abortion remains a TV network/advertiser third-rail — and if the script is likewise re-produced verbatim, it’ll end with the same scene it ended with 50 years ago, carefully constructed by writer Susan Harris to address the national controversy that was abortion. And it’ll no doubt be the talk among families in days and weeks that follow. Or seconds and minutes, given the nature of communication today.
In it, a conflicted and clearly nervous Maude, sitting in her bedroom with husband Walter, seeking reassurance if not solace, asks him if he thinks she’s doing the right thing by not having the baby.
The reply:
“For you, Maude. For me. In the privacy of our own lives, you’re doing the right thing.”
Norman Lear turns 100 years old today.
The ripple that is All in the Family continues.
