When Was All in the Family on Tv
The Evidence That Changed Tv set Forever
All in the Family unit was the beginning plan to genuinely reckon with the cultural upheaval of 1960s America. Television would never be the same.
Adapted from Rock Me on the H2o, HarperCollins Publishers, 2021.
When CBS first placed All in the Family on the air, on Jan 12, 1971, it irrevocably transformed television. After a shaky kickoff season in which information technology struggled to find an audience, the bear witness prospered, rising to become No. 1 in the ratings for five consecutive years, a record unmatched at the time. All in the Family allowable national attending to a degree nearly impossible to imagine in today's fractionated amusement landscape. Archie Bunker'due south catchwords—stifle, meathead, and dingbat—all became national shorthand. Scholars earnestly debated whether the show punctured or promoted bigotry.
Its success non only helped lift The Mary Tyler Moore Show, 1000*A*South*H, and the other corking topical comedies of the early 1970s, but too cemented the thought that television could exist used to comment meaningfully on the society around 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 every bit Fleabag, Atlanta, Breaking Bad, The Wire, and countless others. The dark that CBS initially aired All in the Family was the showtime footstep on the road toward the Peak Idiot box that we are living through today.
All in the Family condensed the "generation gap" of the 1960s into a single living room. Information technology pitted Mike Stivic, a long-haired liberal, and his wife, the bubbly Gloria, against Gloria's male parent, Archie Bunker, a reactionary bigot and Richard Nixon–loving dockworker—as Edith, the daffy but benevolent wife and mother, looked on. Incarnated by a stellar cast and energized by brilliant writing and directing, it became a television set landmark, widely lauded as one of the greatest and virtually 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 reach more relevance had nigh all failed, mostly considering they were also laden with practiced intentions to attract an audience. That All in the Family not merely reached the air simply prospered was the result of two men: Norman Lear, its staunchly liberal creator, and Robert D. Wood, the conservative president of CBS, who put information technology on the schedule. That act revolutionized television receiver, simply both men were unlikely revolutionaries.
Norman Lear was the son of a man whose dreams dissolved quickly but whose resentments outlived him in the work of his son. Herman Lear was a small-time salesman and entrepreneur, and a fountain of dubious get-rich-quick schemes. His wife, Jeanette, according to Norman, was self-captivated, discontented, and, like her hubby, volatile. Later on, they would become Lear'southward early models for Archie and Edith Bunker. Throughout his childhood in Connecticut and Brooklyn, Lear's parents immersed him in an surroundings of barely controlled chaos. The two of them, Lear would often say, "lived at the ends of their fretfulness and the tops of their lungs." At the summit of statement, the veins in his neck bulging, Lear'southward father would beat his fists against his chest and bellow at Lear'due south mother, "Jeanette, stifle yourself."
Similar many children of the Peachy Low, Lear constitute direction and structure in the military machine. Later on drifting through a few semesters at Emerson College, in Boston, he enlisted in the Army Air Force following Pearl Harbor and flew dozens of bombing missions over Germany. After a few years working as a Broadway press amanuensis and, later on, for his father, Lear fabricated a decision that proved a turning indicate: He loaded his married woman and infant daughter into a 1946 Oldsmobile convertible and pointed it toward Los Angeles. There, he hoped for a fresh commencement, simply struggled to discover piece of work. He was reduced to selling piece of furniture and baby photos door-to-door with a man named Ed Simmons, an aspiring comedy author who was the husband of Lear's cousin.
One night, Lear helped Simmons finish a parody of a popular song he had been writing. When they found a nightclub singer to buy the song, their payday was only $xl between them, but that was enough to convince the two to drop their salesman's satchels and plunge into a total-time writing partnership. Shortly after, they caught the attending of industry insiders and began writing for an early television-variety show.
Through the 1950s, Lear'due south career advanced in pace with the growth of television set itself. These were the years of television's so-chosen golden age, when hostage dramas such equally The Philco Television receiver Playhouse groomed a steady stream of young directors for Hollywood. Lear marinated in the other keen television production of those years: the star-led diverseness shows, such as Sid Caesar'south Your Bear witness of Shows, that drew on traditions of vaudeville and radio one-act.
Lear thrived in this globe. He began to ricochet betwixt Los Angeles and New York, mastering the breakneck pace of television receiver production—he survived the abiding deadlines, he later 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, absorbing the rhythms of sketches that had to chop-chop grip an audience's attending between singers and dancing acts.
His work was skilled and professional, and his shows were sufficiently successful to constantly open new doors for him. Eventually, he and Simmons ended their partnership, and Lear took upwards with the director Bud Yorkin, with whom he created a production company that developed both television programs and movies for Paramount.
Some of these films (including Come Accident Your Horn and Divorce American Style) managed respectable box-role returns, merely none generated much critical excitement. No reviewers saw in the Lear and Yorkin movies, or their succession of television specials with soft-edged mainstream entertainers, the profile of anything new. Looking dorsum, one Hollywood executive described them in those years equally "yeoman producers, just guys that would get their heads down and practise the piece of work." Little of Lear's work in the 1960s signaled that he had much to say about the way America was transforming around him. "Hither'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 proficient than the things he was doing."
Within a few years, millions would agree, but non until Lear met another World State of war II veteran who was an even more than unlikely candidate to transform the nature of television.
The career of Robert D. Wood, the CBS executive who ultimately put All in the Family unit on the air, proceeded well-nigh exactly in parallel with Lear'south. While Lear served in the Army Air Strength during World War II, Wood spent three years in the Navy, including time in the S Pacific. Subsequently the state of war, he graduated with a degree in advertising 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 chapter in 50.A., KNX. By 1960, he'd risen up the ranks to get vice president and manager of the network's local television affiliate. His elevation to that role all-powerful him every bit a prince in the CBS empire. The affiliate, KNXT, was one of the five TV stations effectually the state that the federal government permitted CBS to ain and operate directly during this period. These "O&O stations" were concentrated in the largest markets and generated enormous profits. CBS granted great autonomy to O&O full general managers similar Wood and marked them as future leaders. The network also pushed managers to evangelize on-air editorials, like those in local newspapers, merely left them near entirely costless to determine the content.
Woods thrived in this part. "He was actually proud of being the editorial voice, the guy who appeared in the editorials, and he was good at information technology," recalled Pete Noyes, a prominent news producer at KNXT in those years. "He had a neat presence." Wood hired Howard Williams, an editorial writer from the conservative Los Angeles Mirror, to help him develop the station'due south editorial line.
Woods was a gregarious boss, with a salesman's effortless capacity to make friends and create camaraderie. He knew everybody'southward proper name and had fourth dimension to talk to anyone. "Didn't thing who they were … he was your buddy," Williams said. Forest'southward politics were consistently bourgeois, reflecting the center of gravity in Fifty.A. media and business 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 offset demonstrations by the free-oral communication movement erupted at UC Berkeley, Forest, in 1 of his on-air editorials, called the demonstrators "witless agitators" and insisted that they "be dealt with quickly and severely to prepare an example for all time to those who agitate for the sake of agitation."
A few years later, CBS promoted Wood once more, relocating him to the East Coast, where he took on a succession of peak-level jobs. In early 1969, Wood was named president of the CBS Telly Network, the company's highest-ranking television set position.
This promotion placed him atop the most powerful and profitable of the three television networks. CBS'southward preeminence was symbolized past its imposing Midtown Manhattan headquarters, an austere and dramatic spire of charcoal-gray granite known as Black Stone. From his 34th-floor office, Wood entered a Mad Men environment that appeared frozen in fourth dimension. This was a more urbane, cosmopolitan, and cutthroat world than the domesticated cycle of Junior League dinners and weekends at the embankment that Forest had left backside in Los Angeles. Simply he took to it 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 comfortable discussing football than philosophy.
But for all the power and profitability that CBS projected through the late '60s, it couldn't entirely ignore the social changes of the era. CBS faced disruption from the same demographic-driven transformation of its audience that had staggered the movie studios and sent weekly admissions in motion-picture show theaters plummeting through the '50s and '60s. Like Hollywood, the television networks faced a growing disconnection betwixt their musty products and the young Babe Boomers whose swelling numbers and growing buying power were reshaping the market for popular culture. And Forest, with his grounding in Los Angeles, felt the tremors earlier than nearly anyone else effectually him.
Inorthward 1961, Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, disparaged television as "a vast wasteland." But he would have been simply as authentic to call information technology "a vast cornfield."
Through the 1960s, the networks stubbornly looked abroad from the simultaneous earthquakes disrupting American life: the civil-rights and antiwar movements, the nightly carnage of Vietnam, the rise of the drug culture, the sexual revolution, and the feminist awakening. Instead, they mostly offered viewers a gauzy, pastoral vision of America.
With only three networks, shows needed to attract enormous viewership to survive. The prevailing aim at the networks and the advertising agencies was to produce what became known as "the least objectionable program" that could describe the virtually diverse viewership. In practise, this translated into shows that would exist acceptable not simply to urban sophisticates only besides to small-town traditionalists. So, off the CBS assembly line flowed a procession of banal comedies celebrating the simple wisdom of rural life, including The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Evidence. Surrounding them were multifariousness shows and comedies led by crumbling figures from the '50s and even before, such equally Ed Sullivan and Lucille Brawl. Each night, CBS chronicled the tumultuous strains vehement at America on Walter Cronkite'due south newscast and then spent the side by side three and a half hours of prime time trying to erase them from viewers' minds.
CBS's first attempt to reflect the irresolute culture came in 1967, when information technology premiered The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. The Smothers Brothers, Tom the leader and Dick the straight man, were a modestly successful duo who had built an audience through albums and a nightclub act that combined stand-upwardly comedy with gentle parodies of folk music. Their show was a hitting from the offset and chop-chop became the one spot on television 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.
Equally the show's audition grew, Tom Smothers in particular became determined to utilize the platform to deliver a distinctly liberal message almost contemporary bug, especially the Vietnam War. Tom said, "There's no point of beingness on television … at this betoken in time, with what'due south going on in this country, and not reflect what's going on," recalled Rob Reiner, the future All in the Family star, who joined the bear witness for part of its final flavor as a writer. CBS censors predictably recoiled, snipping lines from some segments and rejecting others completely. The bear witness had supporters inside CBS, but the network's senior leadership grew weary of the constant arguments. Wood canceled the evidence in early April 1969, less than two months after he'd assumed the network'due south presidency.
The counterfoil underscored the difficulty of changing CBS. But force per unit area for a new approach was edifice, and information technology came, surprisingly, from the network's business staff. CBS had the biggest audiences, but ABC and NBC were successfully wooing advertisers with their arguments that they had better audiences: young, affluent consumers in urban centers. "Information technology was the sales department that said if nosotros desire to be competitive, we ought to try to get a younger profile with our audience," said Gene Jankowski, a CBS advert executive who later became the network'south 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 culture. He didn't talk about the network as a public trust; he saw it, unsentimentally, by and large as a vehicle to sell lather and cars. Michael Ovitz, and so a immature agent, recalled that no 1 in the creative community looked to Woods for insight. "He never read a script," Ovitz said. "And if he did, no one cared what he had to say about it." Neither did Wood experience any urge to provide a platform for the new voices and social movements agitating for modify: Fifty-fifty after he moved to more liberal New York Metropolis, his politics remained anchored well right of eye. Irwin Segelstein, a pinnacle CBS programming executive, afterward said of Forest, "Bob is actually Archie Bunker. The radical-right Irish gaelic conservative."
But the advertising department found Wood receptive to its arguments for a new management. One 24-hour interval in Feb 1970, Woods 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 Rider. "A certain genre of films were pulling young people away," Wood said later. "I sensed a shift in the national mood." Wood knew he needed a program that would make a loud statement in social club to attract new viewers. He "wanted to get some prove that would cause some conversation," recalled Perry Lafferty, the former director and producer serving as CBS's vice president for programming in Hollywood. Norman Lear, during the beginning two decades of his evidence-business career, had displayed neither much interest nor much facility in generating chat, but Lear would provide Woods exactly what he was looking for, and then some.
All in the Family began as a British television evidence titled Till Expiry United states of america Exercise Role, the story of a working-form bigot, his sharp-tongued wife, their daughter, and her married man. Information technology 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 show 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 father, Herman. In tardily summer 1968, he acquired the rights to the project and secured a contract from ABC to develop a pilot.
Lear did not begin adapting Till Death with any ambition to transform television. "I have never, ever remembered thinking, Oh, we're doing something outlandish, riotously dissimilar," he recalled. "I wasn't on any mission. And I don't remember I knew I was breaking such ground. I didn't sentry Petticoat Junction, for Chrissake. I didn't picket Beverly Hillbillies. I didn't know what I was doing." To the extent that he had an ulterior motive, information technology was more financial than artistic: Lear was attracted to owning a situation comedy that would provide a lasting stream of revenue if information technology were syndicated for reruns.
Lear moved quickly to write, cast, and motion picture a 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 name, but both had worked steadily: O'Connor had been a character player in dozens of movies and boob tube shows through the '60s, and Stapleton had worked on Broadway and in television set. Lear bandage two lesser-known younger actors as Mike and Gloria, and shot a pilot in late September 1968. ABC, however, rejected it—besides as a 2d, redo pilot he shot a yr later.
Lear's agent pushed the concept to CBS. Wood was initially hesitant, but soon recognized that he had establish his conversation starter. He later explained his thinking to the sociologist Todd Gitlin: "I really thought the pilot was very, very funny … Information technology sure seemed to me a terrific way to test this whole attitude nigh the network." Just a year after Woods buried the Smothers Brothers, he gave new life to Archie Bunker.
Even with Forest's support, the show faced formidable headwinds within CBS. William Paley, the autocratic chairman of the lath, hated it from the showtime, considering information technology vulgar. But Woods was determined. "Bob Wood had assurance," said James Rosenfield, an advertizement 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 Wood came out of sales. He didn't take any clout with the Hollywood customs. He didn't know Norman Lear, but he understood that there was an opportunity hither for significant change in the medium, and he made information technology happen."
With the go-ahead from CBS, Lear reshaped the cast with new choices for the younger roles. For Gloria, the Bunkers' girl, he chose Sally Struthers, a young blonde whom Lear had seen on the Smothers Brothers and in the movie 5 Piece of cake Pieces. For Mike, the son-in-police force, 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's stilted kickoff attempts to admit the irresolute youth culture, on individual episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies and Gomer Pyle. "I was like the resident Hollywood hippie," Reiner said later.
For the director, Lear chose John Rich, a skilled goggle box veteran whom he had met two decades earlier. Coincidentally, Rich had been approached at most exactly the same time to directly The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which preceded All in the Family on the air at CBS by four months. While Mary was pathbreaking in its own, quieter way—illustrating the changing roles of women in American gild through deft and affectionate character studies—to Rich the show didn't announced nearly as revolutionary every bit Lear's project. "It 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, 'Yes.' 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 evidence'south futurity always seemed tenuous to the cast and crew every bit they worked toward their January 1971 premiere. "Nosotros knew we were doing something good, just we didn't recollect anybody was going to get for this," Reiner remembered. O'Connor was so skeptical that the prove would survive that he held on to the lease for the apartment in Rome where he had been living and fabricated Lear promise to pay for a first-class ticket back if the show was canceled.
Lear, likewise, felt that CBS's commitment was only conditional. Aye, Wood had bought the show, but he remained skittish almost it. "He wanted to adventure, just he fought me molar and nail," Lear remembered. Woods and CBS were simply uncertain that a testify this different from their usual programming would find an audience. "That'south all they worried about," Lear said. "Information technology'south equally uncomplicated equally 'Nosotros don't know if this works.' Nosotros know the Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction—nosotros know that works. We don't know if this works." During the filming of an early episode, Rich was in the control room when Woods stopped past the prepare. "I hope you know what you're doing," he told the director, "considering my rump is on the line here." But weeks before the bear witness was scheduled to air, CBS still had failed to sell whatever advert to air with it.
From the start, Lear participated in an unrelenting push and pull with the CBS censors over the testify's language and content. The network's caution was evident in the time slot it selected for the evidence: Tuesday, a night it didn't view every bit pivotal, at ix:30 p.m., betwixt Hee Haw and the CBS News Hour. In advance of the premiere, Wood sent a telegram to CBS affiliates quoting a speech he'd delivered the previous leap: "We have to broaden our base," he wrote. "We have to attract new viewers. We're going to operate on the theory that it is better to try something new than not to endeavor information technology and wonder what would have happened if nosotros had."
CBS even developed an unusual disclaimer to appear just before the bear witness's first episode, explaining that All in the Family unit "seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to testify—in a mature fashion—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 bear witness at the same fourth dimension," Reiner remembered.
CBS's ambivalence crystallized into a single choice: which episode to air first. Lear wanted to commencement with the third version of the pilot, which he had taped with the new cast. Viewed even decades afterwards, the episode is explosive. Summoning painful memories, viscerally connected to his characters, Lear, and so in his mid-40s, establish in his script a passionate and urgent phonation he had never before tapped. Within minutes, Archie is raging against "your spics and your spades"; complaining nigh "Hebes" and "Black beauties"; calling Edith a "silly dingbat" and telling her to "stifle" herself; and describing Mike equally a "impaired Polack" and "the laziest white man I've e'er seen"—the latter a reprise of an insult that Herman Lear used to direct at his son. Mike, but every bit heatedly, is blaming crime on poverty and insisting that he and Gloria meet no evidence that God exists. In the opening scene, Archie and Edith go far home early on from church and catch Mike kissing Gloria amorously as he carries her toward the sleeping accommodation. Archie is scandalized: "eleven:x on a Sun morning time," he grumbles in his thick Queens patois.
This was all a chip much for CBS, particularly the "Sunday morning" line—which clearly suggested that the young couple was on their way to have sex (during daylight, no less). The network insisted that Lear have it out; he refused. Forest offered a compromise: The line could stay in if Lear agreed to push the pilot episode back to the 2nd week and run the projected second show kickoff. Lear refused over again. He believed the pilot episode presented "Archie in total," with all his prejudices and animosities on open display. Airing it was like jumping into the deep finish of a pool; CBS and Lear together would "get fully moisture the first fourth dimension out," as Lear after described information technology. In what would go a common occurrence, Lear told Woods he would quit if CBS started with the second episode.
On Jan 12, 1971, the date that All in the Family unit was scheduled to appear for the commencement time, Rich and the crew were performing a wearing apparel rehearsal for the season's sixth episode in the CBS complex known as Boob tube City, at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. Just earlier vi:30 California time, they crowded into Rich's small-scale control room, where they could watch a network feed every bit the evidence'southward 9:30 eastern airtime approached. They might accept caught the last minutes of Hee Haw, a last vestige of television's obsession with rural audiences, earlier the control room filled with the disembodied vocalism reading CBS'southward foreign disclaimer. And then came the sounds of Jean Stapleton at the piano every bit she and Carroll O'Connor sang the show's nostalgic theme vocal, "Those Were the Days." Nevertheless, information technology wasn't clear yet which episode CBS had placed on the air. Within moments came the paradigm of Mike pursuing Gloria in the kitchen and her parents arriving home early from church building, the initial scenes of the airplane pilot. The CBS eye had blinked. Goggle box'south 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 telly ever fabricated.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/03/how-all-family-changed-american-tv-forever/618353/
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