The lovable bigot is just a bigot
I’ve been struggling to write a project this whole Spring break, a historiography of All in the Family, the 1970s show that if you ask anyone over 50 about it, they usually have some remark about how “oh it was so edgy!” It was “so ahead of its time!”. And when I tell them I am writing about it, they want to tell me all the great moments I should write about: Edith has jury duty. Archie’s friend is gay. Archie has a heart attack (not sure if that happened, but probably.) I could also “um actually” them and tell them that my paper is not a textual analysis, but a look at how critiques have discussed it since it aired, sort of a meta-analysis. So, I haven’t needed to watch a lot of it to do close analysis, nor is the quality of it the focus.
But something happens to a beloved media artifact when you study it academically. You resent it. I’m tired of writing about it because I’m tired of the project, but I am also tired of it because before 2000, most literature on it praises the show as CHANGING TELEVISION AS WE KNOW IT and claiming Norman Lear a visionary.
But the show is bad. It’s terrible. It’s terrible as a show and terrible as a message to America. Sure, am I judging it by today’s standards? Yes, but that’s part of being a cultural studies researcher.
And, to the surprise of no one, when it was airing, women are the only voices that call it for what it is: bad. Does that mean women can’t get a joke? They are too sensitive? No, they call it for what it is. You can call having a bigot as a star of the show satire, but in the end, you are putting a bigot on tv and telling people he is loveable.
In 1971, Stephanie Harrington wrote, “For 30 minutes Archie is nothing but bigoted about others and unbelievably rotten to his family. And because the show is one-dimensional, because its characters are caricatures, it cannot even claim the shock value of being courageously, uncompromisingly true to life.”
An author (woman) wrote an op-ed in the New York times shortly after it aired, wondering how Norman Lear expected to change people’s minds when Archie’s bigotry was rarely punished. Lear wrote back an equivalent of “you just don’t get it, let me explain it to you.”
In 1975, The New Republic anticipated the ending of the series:
The final episode may pay some respects to it intent. Archie could choke yelling Dingbat and collapse in a heap. Edith could go immediately afterward, tripped by a chicken leg. The children could be hit by a sound truck for Cesar Chavez while running for help. Ding-a-ling. Bang. Gone. Then all come forward and bow. We will go wild with applause and stand up shouting as Archie’s head fills the screen, big as life, handsome old baby face, scrubbed to a glow and ready to meet his maker. A spotlight traces the skull beneath the skin. How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?
[This may be my favorite paragraph in television criticism.]
Nobody really mentioned Edith, an emotional battered wife, until about 10 years later.
Yes, Normal Lear’s vision of sitcoms that were political that showed black families and working class families. That was important to cultural history. It introduced a satirical way of looking at things (although many people took Archie to be someone to admire). And maybe I am mixing subjective criticism with an analysis, but it is hard not to. This show is bad. I like the conversations it started, and I understand its importance, but I wish it wasn’t this show. This show about a man that terrorizes his family with so much hate and anger. All the time.
Now I’ll contradict myself and say television was different in the 1970s, people probably had more patience to sit with one story without flashy editing. But being in that small queens home with the miserable abusive man is emotionally and physically claustrophobic. It is a fucking nightmare.
Finally, in 2001, Josh Ostrosky had the COURAGE to call the show what it was- badly constructed.
This anger, though, all derives from one source. The characters aren’t angry with each other: they are generally angry with Archie, or reacting to Archie’s anger, or both. The tension in All in the Family all radiates from him. The show’s cast is a constellation of one-dimensional characters who only exist for purposes of comparison…Lionel Jefferson patronizes Archie, Edith one-ups him in a saintly and bemused way, Mike engages him head-on, Gloria rolls her eyes and pouts. Even when no one steps to breach to put Archie down, the chorus of divisive laughter from the studio audience reassures us that he stands for wrongheadedness
I DARE you to sit through an entire episode. I barely could. Jean Stapleton is amazing, but her character is a woman being held hostage. Sally Struthers is trying her best with lines that make her character void of joy.
Did you make it? Can you imagine a world in which you have to live in a house with this family for eight seasons? Does Archie Bunker remind you of anyone? Someone in the White House? Take this quiz, it’s actually kind of difficult.
Normal Lear finally redeemed himself for this for the remake of One Day At a Time. But it took him almost 50 years to get it right.
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