Artist From Tv Show All in the Family
The Testify That Changed Television Forever
All in the Family unit was the showtime program to genuinely reckon with the cultural upheaval of 1960s America. TV would never exist the same.
Adjusted from Rock Me on the Water, HarperCollins Publishers, 2021.
When CBS starting time placed All in the Family unit on the air, on January 12, 1971, it irrevocably transformed television. After a shaky get-go flavour in which it struggled to observe an audience, the evidence prospered, rising to become No. one in the ratings for five consecutive years, a record unmatched at the time. All in the Family commanded national attending to a degree almost impossible to imagine in today'southward fractionated entertainment landscape. Archie Bunker's catchwords—stifle, meathead, and dingbat—all became national autograph. Scholars earnestly debated whether the show punctured or promoted bigotry.
Its success not merely helped lift The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*South*H, and the other great topical comedies of the early 1970s, but besides cemented the idea that television could be used to comment meaningfully on the society effectually it—an idea the networks had uniformly rejected throughout all the upheaval of the 1960s. That legacy—the decision to connect the medium to the moment—reverberates through shows as diverse as 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 Television that nosotros 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's father, Archie Bunker, a reactionary bigot and Richard Nixon–loving dockworker—as Edith, the daffy but benevolent wife and female parent, looked on. Incarnated by a stellar cast and energized past brilliant writing and directing, information technology became a television landmark, widely lauded as one of the greatest and most 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 earlier All in the Family, shows that tried to reach more than relevance had almost all failed, mostly because they were too laden with good intentions to attract an audience. That All in the Family not simply reached the air but prospered was the result of 2 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, only both men were unlikely revolutionaries.
Norman Lear was the son of a man whose dreams dissolved quickly but whose resentments outlived him in the piece of work of his son. Herman Lear was a small-scale-time 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'due south 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 2 of them, Lear would often say, "lived at the ends of their nerves and the tops of their lungs." At the peak of statement, the veins in his neck bulging, Lear's father would vanquish his fists confronting his chest and bellow at Lear'south mother, "Jeanette, stifle yourself."
Similar many children of the Cracking Depression, Lear found direction and construction in the military. Later 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, subsequently, for his father, Lear made a decision that proved a turning indicate: He loaded his wife and infant daughter into a 1946 Oldsmobile convertible and pointed it toward Los Angeles. There, he hoped for a fresh showtime, merely struggled to find work. He was reduced to selling furniture and baby photos door-to-door with a man named Ed Simmons, an aspiring comedy writer who was the hubby of Lear'south cousin.
One night, Lear helped Simmons finish a parody of a popular vocal he had been writing. When they found a nightclub vocalist to buy the song, their payday was just $forty between them, but that was plenty to convince the two to drib their salesman'south satchels and plunge into a full-time writing partnership. Soon after, they caught the attention of industry insiders and began writing for an early tv-variety show.
Through the 1950s, Lear'due south career advanced in step with the growth of television itself. These were the years of television's so-chosen aureate age, when earnest dramas such as The Philco Television Playhouse groomed a steady stream of young directors for Hollywood. Lear marinated in the other bully television product of those years: the star-led variety shows, such every bit Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, that drew on traditions of vaudeville and radio comedy.
Lear thrived in this earth. He began to ricochet between Los Angeles and New York, mastering the breakneck pace of television production—he survived the constant deadlines, he after recalled, on Dexedrine to stay awake for all-night writing sessions and Seconal to sleep when they were over. He honed his sense of one-act, arresting the rhythms of sketches that had to quickly grip an audience's attending betwixt singers and dancing acts.
His piece of 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 up with the director Bud Yorkin, with whom he created a product company that developed both television programs and movies for Paramount.
Some of these films (including Come up Accident Your Horn and Divorce American Style) managed respectable box-office returns, but none generated much disquisitional 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, 1 Hollywood executive described them in those years equally "yeoman producers, only guys that would get their heads downward and exercise the work." Little of Lear'due south piece of work in the 1960s signaled that he had much to say about the way America was transforming effectually him. "Here's an example, 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 than intellectually practiced than the things he was doing."
Within a few years, millions would agree, but not until Lear met some other World War II veteran who was an even 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'southward. While Lear served in the Army Air Strength during World State of war II, Wood spent iii years in the Navy, including time in the South Pacific. After the 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 young family.
Wood started his career in advertising sales for the CBS radio affiliate in L.A., KNX. By 1960, he'd risen up the ranks to become vice president and managing director of the network's local television affiliate. His elevation to that part all-powerful him as a prince in the CBS empire. The affiliate, KNXT, was 1 of the five TV stations around the state that the federal government permitted CBS to own and operate straight during this period. These "O&O stations" were full-bodied in the largest markets and generated enormous profits. CBS granted not bad autonomy to O&O general managers similar Wood and marked them every bit time to come leaders. The network also pushed managers to deliver on-air editorials, like those in local newspapers, but left them almost entirely gratis to decide the content.
Woods thrived in this part. "He was really proud of being the editorial voice, the guy who appeared in the editorials, and he was good at it," recalled Pete Noyes, a prominent news producer at KNXT in those years. "He had a nifty presence." Wood hired Howard Williams, an editorial writer from the conservative Los Angeles Mirror, to help him develop the station's editorial line.
Wood was a gregarious boss, with a salesman'due south effortless capacity to make friends and create camaraderie. He knew everybody'southward name and had time to talk to anyone. "Didn't matter who they were … he was your buddy," Williams said. Wood's politics were consistently conservative, reflecting the center of gravity in 50.A. media and business organisation 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 past the free-spoken language movement erupted at UC Berkeley, Woods, in one of his on-air editorials, called the demonstrators "witless agitators" and insisted that they "exist dealt with quickly and severely to set up an case for all time to those who arouse for the sake of agitation."
A few years afterwards, CBS promoted Woods again, relocating him to the East Coast, where he took on a succession of top-level jobs. In early 1969, Forest was named president of the CBS Television set Network, the company's highest-ranking television position.
This promotion placed him atop the most powerful and profitable of the three television networks. CBS'southward preeminence was symbolized by its imposing Midtown Manhattan headquarters, an austere and dramatic spire of charcoal-gray granite known as Black Rock. 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 beach that Forest had left behind in Los Angeles. But he took to it naturally. To many around him, Woods came beyond as the Westward Coast equivalent of an Ivy Leaguer, confident and smoothen, if no intellectual; he was always more than comfortable discussing football game than philosophy.
But for all the ability and profitability that CBS projected through the late '60s, information technology 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 movie theaters plummeting through the '50s and '60s. Like Hollywood, the television set networks faced a growing disconnection between their musty products and the young Baby Boomers whose swelling numbers and growing buying power were reshaping the marketplace for popular civilisation. And Wood, with his grounding in Los Angeles, felt the tremors earlier than most anyone else around him.
In 1961, Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, disparaged television receiver as "a vast wasteland." Simply he would have been but as accurate to call it "a vast cornfield."
Through the 1960s, the networks stubbornly looked away from the simultaneous earthquakes disrupting American life: the civil-rights and antiwar movements, the nightly carnage of Vietnam, the ascension 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 advertizing agencies was to produce what became known as "the least objectionable programme" that could describe the most diverse viewership. In practice, this translated into shows that would be adequate non only to urban sophisticates only likewise to small-scale-town traditionalists. And then, off the CBS associates line flowed a procession of banal comedies celebrating the uncomplicated wisdom of rural life, including The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show. Surrounding them were diversity shows and comedies led by aging figures from the '50s and even before, such as Ed Sullivan and Lucille Brawl. Each night, CBS chronicled the tumultuous strains trigger-happy at America on Walter Cronkite'due south newscast and and so spent the next iii and a half hours of prime time trying to erase them from viewers' minds.
CBS's outset attempt to reverberate the changing culture came in 1967, when information technology premiered The Smothers Brothers Comedy 60 minutes. The Smothers Brothers, Tom the leader and Dick the straight homo, were a modestly successful duo who had built an audience through albums and a nightclub act that combined stand-up comedy with gentle parodies of folk music. Their show was a hit from the outset and apace became the 1 spot on television that seemed witting of the burgeoning youth civilisation. Cutting-edge bands such as Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, The Who, and Simon and Garfunkel all appeared.
Every bit the prove's audience grew, Tom Smothers in particular became determined to use the platform to deliver a distinctly liberal message about contemporary issues, particularly the Vietnam War. Tom said, "There'due south no point of being on television … at this point in time, with what'south going on in this state, and not reflect what'southward going on," recalled Rob Reiner, the future All in the Family unit star, who joined the show for part of its final season as a author. CBS censors predictably recoiled, snipping lines from some segments and rejecting others completely. The show had supporters inside CBS, but the network's senior leadership grew weary of the constant arguments. Wood canceled the prove in early Apr 1969, less than two months later on he'd causeless the network'due south presidency.
The cancellation underscored the difficulty of changing CBS. But pressure for a new approach was building, and it came, surprisingly, from the network's concern 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. "It was the sales department that said if we want to exist competitive, we ought to try to get a younger profile with our audience," said Gene Jankowski, a CBS advertising executive who later became the network's president.
Forest 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 exit his mark on the culture. He didn't talk almost the network equally a public trust; he saw it, unsentimentally, mostly equally a vehicle to sell soap and cars. Michael Ovitz, then a immature amanuensis, recalled that no one 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 near it." Neither did Wood feel any urge to provide a platform for the new voices and social movements agitating for change: Even later he moved to more than liberal New York City, his politics remained anchored well right of center. Irwin Segelstein, a top CBS programming executive, later said of Forest, "Bob is really Archie Bunker. The radical-right Irish gaelic bourgeois."
But the advertisement department found Wood receptive to its arguments for a new management. One day in February 1970, Wood came to the sales department and said that CBS had to get younger in its programming and its audition. Privately, he told CBS executives that he feared losing the younger generation to the edgy new movies emerging from Hollywood, like Easy Rider. "A sure genre of films were pulling young people away," Woods said later on. "I sensed a shift in the national mood." Woods knew he needed a program that would make a loud statement in club to attract new viewers. He "wanted to get some bear witness that would cause some conversation," recalled Perry Lafferty, the erstwhile managing director and producer serving as CBS's vice president for programming in Hollywood. Norman Lear, during the first two decades of his show-concern career, had displayed neither much interest nor much facility in generating conversation, simply Lear would provide Wood exactly what he was looking for, and so some.
All in the Family began every bit a British television receiver evidence titled Till Death The states Do Part, the story of a working-form bigot, his abrupt-tongued wife, their daughter, and her husband. It caused a sensation in United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland for its frank handling of racism and other previously taboo topics, and its potential as 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 father and the liberal son-in-law reminded him of his own struggles with his father, Herman. In belatedly summertime 1968, he acquired the rights to the project and secured a contract from ABC to develop a pilot.
Lear did not begin adapting Till Decease with any ambition to transform television set. "I have never, ever remembered thinking, Oh, we're doing something outlandish, riotously unlike," he recalled. "I wasn't on any mission. And I don't call back I knew I was breaking such basis. I didn't watch Petticoat Junction, for Chrissake. I didn't watch Beverly Hillbillies. I didn't know what I was doing." To the extent that he had an ulterior motive, it was more fiscal than artistic: Lear was attracted to owning a state of affairs comedy that would provide a lasting stream of revenue if it were syndicated for reruns.
Lear moved rapidly to write, bandage, and film a pilot for the prove, 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 actor in dozens of movies and goggle box shows through the '60s, and Stapleton had worked on Broadway and in television. Lear cast two bottom-known younger actors as Mike and Gloria, and shot a pilot in late September 1968. ABC, however, rejected information technology—as well as a second, redo pilot he shot a yr later on.
Lear'south agent pushed the concept to CBS. Wood was initially hesitant, only presently recognized that he had found his conversation starter. He afterwards explained his thinking to the sociologist Todd Gitlin: "I actually thought the pilot was very, very funny … It certain seemed to me a terrific way to test this whole mental attitude about the network." Only a yr later on Forest buried the Smothers Brothers, he gave new life to Archie Bunker.
Even with Woods's back up, the show faced formidable headwinds inside CBS. William Paley, the autocratic chairman of the lath, hated information technology from the outset, considering information technology vulgar. But Wood was adamant. "Bob Wood had balls," said James Rosenfield, an advertising salesman at the time who went on to get the president of CBS. "He really had balls, and what I never understood to this twenty-four hour period was how that happened, because Bob Wood came out of sales. He didn't have any clout with the Hollywood customs. He didn't know Norman Lear, just he understood that there 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 picture Five Easy 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 pilus and unabashedly liberal views, had become the become-to casting pick for the manufacture's stilted first attempts to acknowledge the changing youth culture, on private 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 television veteran whom he had met ii decades before. Coincidentally, Rich had been approached at almost exactly the same time to direct 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 irresolute roles of women in American society through deft and affectionate graphic symbol studies—to Rich the show didn't appear virtually as revolutionary as Lear's project. "It was 1970, and the dialogue that was written then just blew me away," Rich remembered. "And I chosen Norman … I said, 'Y'all aren't going to make this, are you?' He said, 'Yeah.' I said, 'Is anybody going to put it on?' He said, 'They say they volition.'"
Rich'due south uncertainty, even incredulity, was widely shared. Even with CBS's approval, the testify's future always seemed tenuous to the cast and coiffure as they worked toward their January 1971 premiere. "We knew nosotros were doing something good, just nosotros didn't recollect anybody was going to go for this," Reiner remembered. O'Connor was and so skeptical that the show 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 showtime-form ticket back if the show was canceled.
Lear, too, felt that CBS's commitment was only provisional. Yes, Woods had bought the testify, but he remained skittish virtually it. "He wanted to adventure, but he fought me molar and blast," Lear remembered. Wood and CBS were simply uncertain that a bear witness this unlike from their usual programming would detect an audience. "That's all they worried about," Lear said. "Information technology's as elementary as 'We don't know if this works.' We know the Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction—nosotros know that works. We don't know if this works." During the filming of an early on episode, Rich was in the control room when Woods stopped by the set. "I promise yous know what you're doing," he told the director, "because my rump is on the line here." Just weeks before the show was scheduled to air, CBS still had failed to sell whatever advertizing to air with it.
From the kickoff, Lear participated in an unrelenting push and pull with the CBS censors over the show'southward language and content. The network's circumspection was axiomatic in the time slot it selected for the show: Tuesday, a night it didn't view equally pivotal, at nine:30 p.grand., between 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. "Nosotros take to attract new viewers. We're going to operate on the theory that information technology is improve to try something new than not to try information technology and wonder what would take happened if nosotros had."
CBS even adult an unusual disclaimer to appear only before the prove'due south beginning episode, explaining that All in the Family "seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. Past making them a source of laughter, we hope to show—in a mature manner—simply how absurd they are." To the cast, the disclaimer "was ridiculous, because they're putting the prove on the air, and all the same they're trying to distance themselves from the show at the same fourth dimension," Reiner remembered.
CBS'southward ambivalence crystallized into a unmarried option: which episode to air get-go. Lear wanted to start with the third version of the pilot, which he had taped with the new cast. Viewed fifty-fifty decades later, the episode is explosive. Summoning painful memories, viscerally connected to his characters, Lear, and then in his mid-40s, found in his script a passionate and urgent vocalism he had never before tapped. Within minutes, Archie is raging against "your spics and your spades"; lament about "Hebes" and "Black beauties"; calling Edith a "silly dingbat" and telling her to "stifle" herself; and describing Mike as a "impaired 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 equally 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 go far home early on from church and catch Mike kissing Gloria amorously as he carries her toward the bedroom. Archie is scandalized: "eleven:10 on a Sunday morning," he grumbles in his thick Queens patois.
This was all a bit much for CBS, especially the "Sunday morning" line—which clearly suggested that the young couple was on their way to accept sex (during daylight, no less). The network insisted that Lear take information technology out; he refused. Forest offered a compromise: The line could stay in if Lear agreed to push button the pilot episode back to the second week and run the projected 2nd show kickoff. Lear refused again. He believed the pilot episode presented "Archie in total," with all his prejudices and animosities on open up display. Ambulation it was like jumping into the deep cease of a pool; CBS and Lear together would "get fully wet the get-go time out," as Lear afterward described information technology. In what would become a common occurrence, Lear told Woods he would quit if CBS started with the second episode.
On January 12, 1971, the date that All in the Family unit was scheduled to appear for the first time, Rich and the crew were performing a clothes rehearsal for the flavor's sixth episode in the CBS complex known as Goggle box City, at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. Merely before 6:30 California time, they crowded into Rich's small control room, where they could scout a network feed as the prove's ix:30 eastern airtime approached. They might have caught the terminal minutes of Hee Haw, a last vestige of television'due south obsession with rural audiences, before the control room filled with the disembodied vocalism reading CBS's strange disclaimer. Then came the sounds of Jean Stapleton at the piano as she and Carroll O'Connor sang the show'south nostalgic theme song, "Those Were the Days." Still, information technology wasn't clear nevertheless 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 building, the initial scenes of the pilot. The CBS eye had blinked. Tv's search for a new audition had finally torn down the curtain separating it from the tumultuous changes unfolding around it. Through that opening would sally some of the greatest tv ever made.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/03/how-all-family-changed-american-tv-forever/618353/
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