by Jim McKairnes

In his 2014 memoir, Even This I Get To Experience, producer Norman Lear wrote the following about his then-43-year-old landmark television comedy, All in the Family, and how it came to matter:

 “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 a rise 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 the show.’ And so that was the ripple of All in the Family. Families talked.

And so they did.

All in the Family premiered on CBS 50 years ago this week on January 12, 1971, leading to a near-decade run. And a half a century later, families are still talking. Because of the difference the series and its writers made.

What families mostly talked about back in the 1970s is what they were hearing for the first time on primetime scripted television: real-world, often-heated dialogue fueled by real-world, often-heated societal clashes. A generational comedy that hit home (literally), All in the Family focused on young liberal newlyweds (the Stivics) living under the same Queens, New York, roof as the bride’s parents, notably her conservative and bigoted father, Archie Bunker. It was a depiction of everyday life that, as these tales tend to go, nearly doomed the series before it even made it to air, bounced twice from ABC after two versions of the pilot were shot there starting in 1968. The topics: sex, religion, social unrest, beliefs. The approach: frank. The language: blunt, even objectionable. The result: “Funny but impossible to air” (as ABC concluded).

Interest from a different network in search of an image shake-up, as well as a third pilot shot with yet another iteration of the cast, landed All in the Family on the air at CBS as a mid-year replacement during the 1970-71 season. And in a scheduling decision that bespoke both the network’s entrenched traditional audience and the show’s poor testing, it premiered on a Tuesday night at 9:30 PM, after Hee-Haw, and preceded by a warning: 

The program you are about to see is All in the Family. It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to show -- in a mature fashion -- just how absurd they are.

A pebble had hit the lake.

In All in the Family, television had what could be described as its first reality show: characters and situations and conversations that viewers recognized as their own. And in the inflammatory early 1970s, reality mattered: The Brady Bunch could exist only so peacefully against the backdrop of Vietnam. Primetime storytelling about a real-er life came to matter.

It’s not that the Norman Lear series was the first to acknowledge an outside world. When the infant 1950s television came to toddle in the 1960s, several new efforts, from The Dick Van Dyke Show and Room 222 to The Twilight Zone and Ben Casey, explored a more grounded world than I Love Lucy. Race, religion, war. The wholesome Marcus Welby M.D. even touched on abortion. But these were the exceptions, and their real-world threads were external to the fabrics of their shows. With All in the Family, real-world threads became the rule, the points of the show. The series didn’t just offer commentary about the world out there, it addressed it as happening right here. And in how it came to life each week, performed as a stage-play on an inelegant set and recorded with the rawness of videotape rather than the smoothness of film, the real-life connection was reinforced.

We didn’t just watch the Bunkers and the Stivics, we visited them. We knew these people. That was the appeal in homes that tuned in across the country, my large Irish-Catholic working-class family’s Philadelphia home among them. All in the Family marked the first and to my memory only show the nine of us ever watched together as a family on the Good Color TV in the living-room. And while some of the seven children in the room (age range: five to 15) didn’t always get what was there to get, we knew conflict, and we knew funny. That was often enough.

I myself, even at 10, saw pieces of everyone in my family in each fully-realized All in the Family character. And I quickly figured out that my go-to favorite pastime of watching television was now saying something to me, to us, about our actions and their consequences. That we had places in a world larger than the block we lived on. That I had a place. So I made a point to listen. And if the particulars of Archie Bunker’s cruel and blanket derision of the Stivics’ effeminate friend Roger was lost on me when he appeared in just the fifth episode of the series (“Judging Books By Covers”), I absorbed what I heard about Roger being different with a mixture of discomfort and shame. Because I was starting to sense there was something different about me in those pre-adolescent years, as well. And I wondered if that meant Archie and like-minded people would make fun of me at some point, too. And why words were used to hurt at all.

All in the Family rode this reality and connection to prime-time supremacy: it became the most watched show on television for the next five years. It wrenched the television sitcom from its conventional moorings, winning three consecutive Emmys for Best Comedy in the process. Its scripts were honored as no series had been to date. Their illustrations of bigotry and intolerance shocked as they defined us, for there was an Archie Bunker in every living-room that tuned in. The shock wasn’t employed for shock’s sake, though, but rather for our own, to beget awareness.

In success, All in the Family used more to get more. From Watergate and presidential politics to the Equal Rights Amendment and the Vietnam draft, the scripts mirrored and encouraged discussions about our daily lives. Real-world but taboo topics like wife-swapping, rape, impotence, lesbianism, anti-Semitism, and premarital sex were its currency. Some of which, in my family’s case, had to be consumed in the basement by way of the small black-and-white television (the Bad One), outside of parental view, on those occasions when the material was deemed just too racy for the upstairs set. At heart, the series represented a weekly cage match between late-40s Archie’s belligerent adhesion to an old world and early-20s Mike Stivics’  insistence that he join the new and global community. In the way that only All in the Family could manage, however, sometimes these philosophical differences were distilled into the most hysterically trivial of arguments. The more efficient way of donning socks in the morning, for instance. Or how water drawn from a bathroom tap is never to be brought into the kitchen.

Few of the more than 200 All in the Family episodes explored the human condition more artfully than “Edith’s Crisis of Faith.” A two-part story, the episode showed ardent Edith Bunker contemplating leaving the church after cross-dressing family friend, Beverly LaSalle, was beaten to death. (That the episode’s spiritual struggle eclipsed both its then-revolutionary gay-bashing storyline and the airing of its conclusion on Christmas night only underscores its significance.) In an extraordinary exchange, avowed-and-proud atheist son-in-law Mike Stivic, of all those in Edith’s orbit, comes to her counsel:

Mike: “Ma, who you mad at?”

Edith: “I’m made at God.”

Mike: “You think that God was responsible for what happened to Beverly?”

Edith: “I don’t know. All I know is that Beverly was killed because of what he was. And we’re all supposed to be God’s children. It don’t make sense. I don’t understand nothin’ no more.”

[a beat]

Mike: “Ma, did you ever have a subject in school that you didn’t understand?”

Edith: “Yeah. Algebra. I hated it. I couldn’t understand it, so I dropped it.”

Mike: “But you didn’t drop out of school, did you? Ma, what I’m trying to say is that… maybe …maybe we’re not supposed to understand everything all at once. Maybe we’re just supposed to understand things a little bit at a time.”

Edith: “The trouble with me is that I don’t understand nothin’.”

Mike: “Ma, that’s not true. You understand plenty. Ma, if there is a God, you’re one of the most understanding people he ever made. [pause] We need you.

  Mad at God. Even at 17, you sit there watching and thinking to yourself, has television ever said so much or hit so deep? Or mattered more?

The same year that “Edith’s Crisis of Faith” aired in 1977, All in the Family received its first HUMANITAS Prize nomination, for an episode that explored a different kind of betrayal. “Archie’s Brief Encounter” recounted Archie’s flirtation with an extramarital affair and the consequences of his actions when wife Edith finds out. A long trust broken, she leaves him, her parting words directed at Archie but no doubt speaking to and for many: “Archie, the one thing I could always count on was you. Now I can’t count on you no more.” Two other HUMANITAS nominations came over the next (and final) two seasons. “Edith Gets Fired” tackled a new and growing issue -- death with dignity -- as Edith loses her Sunshine Home job after letting an elderly and terminally ill patient die on her own terms. And Edith is incredulous that an act of compassion can be a punishable offense. “The Brother” digs into the 29-year rift between Archie and sibling Fred, showing how childhood words can wound and then forever compromise family bonds if left untreated. (For this episode, the series won the HUMANITAS Prize).

All in the Family aired for the last time in the summer of 1979, after which it transitioned into the sequel Archie Bunker’s Place. The decade of the 1970s, like the television universe, was ending remarkably differently than how it began. Each was due in part to the show. But the impact on my own life was lasting. 10 years after the show ended, in the summer of 1989, I abandoned my nascent East Coast journalism career to follow the guiding star of television -- All in the Family -- across the country to Los Angeles. It was a quickly-considered, life’s-too-short decision borne of family loss. I knew at last it was time to pursue my 20-year-long dream to work in television and to be a part of an industry that on a good day and in the right hands uses words to affect change. CBS, origin of my guiding star, was the aim.

I eked out a small living as a freelance writer in Los Angeles. 18 months in, out of nowhere, I was assigned by a low-profile magazine to interview the producer of a soon-to-premiere new television series, Sunday Dinner. Which is how 18 months and one week after moving to Los Angeles, inspired so many years earlier by All in the Family, I came to be sitting in the office of Norman Lear, then 68, talking about All in the Family. More than once during our meeting, the conversation trailed off to discussions about his family and my own. My background. Eventually, my official reason for meeting with Norman completed, I confessed to him the purpose behind my move to Hollywood: that I was attempting to fight my way into a network television position armed only with desire. As I stuttered in the general direction of (what I hoped) would sound like a question, Norman stopped me. Offering a smile of recognition, he said: “I know exactly what you are trying to say at this point and let me tell you: you will never get anywhere in this town unless you learn to ask.”

He leaned forward at his desk. “So ask.”

     And I did. For advice about breaking into the business.

     Soon after, when I stood to leave, Norman pulled a book from a shelf behind him, opened it to a page and passage he clearly knew by heart, and gifted the book to me. “Read this when you get home.” 

     The book was The Choice Is Always Ours, an anthology of spiritual essays. The passage was from With the Master: A Book of Meditations, by French author and minister Philippe Vernier:

“Therefore do not wait for great strength before setting out, for immobility will weaken you further. Do not wait to see very clearly before starting: one has to walk toward the light. Have you strength enough to take this first step? Courage enough to accomplish this little tiny act of fidelity or a reparation, the necessity of which is apparent to you? Take this step! Perform this act! You will be astonished to feel that the effort accomplished instead of having exhausted your strength, has doubled it, and that you already see more clearly what you have to do next.”

Reading the Vernier passage again later that day, I realized my setting out to Los Angeles 18 months earlier was that first step. Meeting with Norman Lear, who advised an insecure and inexperienced young man hoping to break into an industry everyone clamors to join, represented a second. And both would lead to the rest of the steps in my life. And so it was that, after All in the Family, Norman’s kindness that day became the second gift he’d given me. 

     Six weeks later, I sat in another office, more confident this time. It belonged to the president of CBS, to whom Norman had sent a note, encouraging him to meet me. And not long after that, I was hired at CBS as its newest programming executive. I’d go on to spend 15 years there, enmeshed in television history, working with and around writers and others who, like those responsible for All in the Family, allowed their reaches to exceed their grasps. (Or what was a television heaven for?). For me, it was a lottery win that came 20 years after buying the ticket.

     Decades after the pebble was thrown in the lake, All in the Family continues to ripple, its words continuing to matter. The recent live, word-for-word recreations in prime-time of two of its original episodes prove that ideas shaped nearly 50 years ago can still resonate and challenge. The water can still rise. If it changed both television and the television experience -- which it did -- All in the Family did so with storytelling that was written for its on-screen family but designed for our collective off-screen one. Storytelling that confronted and then challenged. Storytelling that triggered a weekly recalibration of viewers’ moral compasses about issues and problems and struggles they were facing.

     Two generations of writers since continue to build on the ground All in the Family broke, with their own full and deep (and funny) examinations of what it takes to be alive at this time and in this place. Examinations that shine a light both on where we’ve been as a society and where we’re going.

     Thanks to All in the Family, real families talked.

They still do.

Philadelphia-born Jim McKairnes is a writer, media teacher, and podcaster in Nashville who worked as a CBS programming executive in Los Angeles for 15 years. He holds an undergraduate degree in Journalism and in 2018 acquired a Master's in Media & Communications. That same year, Jim authored the comprehensive overview of 1970s television, All in the Decade: 70 Things About 70s TV That Turned Ten Years Into a Revolution. He does not regret his brief dalliance with stand-up comedy back in the 1980s.