It was interesting for me to read the chapter again after all this time. I had a very different approach to writing about things then than I had by the time I got to Men of Tomorrow, even more different from where I am now: less personal and “gestural” (to steal a word from visual artists), more analytical than narrative. I used to be unsure if I was better at intellectual analysis or at emotional narrative. These days I’m pretty sure it’s the latter, but I enjoyed looking at this other writer I might have been. And, really, I think it’s not a bad piece of work.
Here's the first part of the essay, if you're curious:
Long considered one of the most influential voices in American television and founder of the progressive, non-profit, advocacy group People for the American Way, Norman Lear has produced some of the most popular and controversial situation comedies in the history of the genre. His legacy, like his landmark series of the 1970s, is a mixed bag of liberal intentions and competing, regressive messages.
Prior to the 1970s, American sitcoms showed far less inclination for realism and cynicism than their British counterparts, which often left their protagonists trapped by poverty and social immobility. Till Death Do Us Part (1965-75) and Steptoe and Son (1962-74) were two edgy sitcoms made possible by Britain’s non-commercial television. In the former, an aging cockney and his left-wing son-in-law argue violently about social politics while Steptoe and Son features two generations of junk dealers, bound by blood, futility, and class limitations, storylines Norman Lear would mine for cultural commentary and comic relief in his American sitcoms.
By the time Lear bought the American rights for those two British series, he had spent years writing and producing TV variety shows. In the 1960s, he’d teamed up with another TV producer, Bud Yorkin, to make movies under the name Tandem Productions. Their specialty was saucy comedy that took advantage of Hollywood’s loosening censorship restrictions, marked by slick, titillating wit and sage doses of social comment, including Come Blow Your Horn (1963), Divorce American Style (1967), and The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968). Lear was interested in reentering television if he could shatter the networks’ blandness and fear of controversy, and All in the Family (1971-79) was the hammer he wanted to use.
Lear turned Till Death Do Us Part’s xenophobic Brit into Archie Bunker, a blue-collar warehouse worker, union man, unreconstructed racist, and social conservative. His leftist son-in-law is Michael “Mike” Stivic, a Polish-American graduate student in sociology and knee-jerk liberal. Mediating the verbal combat is Archie’s cute, dopey daughter, Gloria Stivic, who loves her father but adopts her husband’s worldview, and Archie’s wife, Edith, who is timid, tolerant, and politically naïve—a “dingbat” in Archie’s parlance. When ABC ordered a pilot, Lear assembled a superb cast. He turned to Carroll O’Connor, a lesser-known Broadway and film actor, who brought Archie to life in all his anger and vulnerability. Another stage veteran, Jean Stapleton, brought the same combination to the character of Edith. Lear cast Carl Reiner’s son, Rob, as the mooching, self-important Mike, and young stage actress Sally Struthers as the naïve, emotionally charge Gloria. The chemistry among them was explosive.
Based on poor test audience reactions in early 1970, ABC rejected the pilot, but it caught the eye of CBS President Bob Wood. His test audiences were no more encouraging, but Wood fought to get the show on the air. During the previous year, he had been overhauling his network’s image, eliminating shows like The Beverly Hillbillies that appealed to older, poorer, and more rustic audiences and replacing them with shows that would appeal to the younger, hipper viewers whom advertisers preferred. Wood was also aware that as the Vietnam War wore on, ethnic movements grew more militant, and feminism hit mainstream America, the national debate was growing broader and louder; sociopolitical arguments were no longer restricted to college students and radicals.
The show was slated for a January 1971 premiere, but Wood and his fellow executives were nervous. Fearing a backlash, they did what they could to soften the blow. They pressured Lear into withdrawing a sly sexual reference and the word “goddamn” from the first script. A disclaimer was scrolled across the screen before the first episode, assuring viewers that its intention was to “throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices and concerns.”
The first episode opens with generational and religious conflicts on full display: Archie and Edith go to church, but Mike and Gloria stay home (with an implication that they do so in order to have sex). A scatological TV taboo is defied when living-room arguments are disrupted by the loudly flushing upstairs toilet. Race enters the picture, as Archie taunts Mike.
Archie: You’re the laziest white boy I ever met.
Mike: Meaning that the blacks are even lazier.
Archie: Wait a second, wise guy . . . I never said that at all. Of course, their systems are geared a little slower that ours, that’s all.
Later episodes continue to air racial, sexual, and religious laundry. Archie parades his archaic, provincial attitudes, filling the airwaves with words formerly taboo: hebe, mick, spic, fag, Polack, jungle bunny. He defends himself in transparent stupidity: “Look, Archie Bunker ain’t no bigot. I’m the first to say that it ain’t your fault that you’re colored.” Inevitably, he gets his comeuppance from the world or from his smug son-in-law.
The network, producers, and advertisers braced themselves for protests from offended conservatives, but the most serious protests came from liberals. Laura Z. Hobson, author of the anti-anti-Semitic Gentleman’s Agreement, took the show to task in the New York Times for making racism acceptable by placing it within an affectionately humorous context. She thought the scripts were particularly dishonest in playing at racial epithets without going all the way: “Hebe” and “jungle bunny” are quaint, almost funny, but “kike” and “nigger” never pass Archie’s lips.
A snowstorm of letters agreed with Hobson. It became the biggest debate ever engendered by a piece of TV entertainment: Did All in the Family ridicule racist behavior or make it seem permissible? Lear presented himself as a misunderstood liberal, maintaining that Archie was a purely negative example, and the plots generally bore him out. Ultimately, most liberal critics praised the show as anti-racist, and schoolteachers across the country requested All in the Family study guides from CBS. The TV professionals who voted for the Emmy awards—generally supportive of liberal-centrist messages—endorsed it enthusiastically.
There was one problem with this liberal scenario: Archie is too damned lovable. He’s ignorant but never mean-spirited. All he wants is to sit in his easy chair, take care of his family, and enjoy his cigars and coffee. Second to Archie in emotional appeal is Edith, well-intentioned but befuddled. She loves Archie, and he loves her. He might not respect her mind, he might tell her to “stifle” herself, he might demand to be served, but he works every day to support her, and he passes up a flirtatious divorcée to remain faithful to her. Gloria isn’t as likable as Edith, but she’s sympathetic enough, and she, too, loves Archie. The show’s most touching moments come when she bridges the gap of generations and hugs her daddy.
Archie’s only constant opponent is Mike, the least likable of the four. He has many good lines and fine ideals, but he takes himself too seriously. He can’t drop his political position to establish a personal link with Archie, and he’s a parasite. He and Gloria live rent-free with the Bunkers while he’s in graduate school, a situation that Archie grudgingly endures out of paternal love but that Mike seems to take as his due. As Archie becomes a better-rounded, more sympathetic character, Mike’s immutable hostility makes him an insensitive ingrate. When he complains to Edith that Archie won’t stop riding him, Edith flashes uncharacteristic indignation. “Do you wanna know why Archie yells are you? Archie yells at you because Archie is jealous of you. You’re going to college. Archie had to quit school to support his family. He ain’t never going to be any more than he is right now. Now you think that over.” Despite all the conscious plot strategies to create a liberal impression, Archie Bunker is the hero.
Lear once said that he “had a strong conviction for some time that you can discuss national issues and deliver a large audience if it’s done just right . . . people will watch. And they will learn.” Lear did indeed parade a lot of “national issues” through the Bunker living room: street crime, anti-Semitism, mixed marriage, Watergate. He even put sexual issues on parade, an easy way of breaking TV taboos, getting press coverage, and drawing a curious audience: Archie is impotent, Mike gets a vasectomy, Edith goes through menopause, Gloria has a miscarriage, someone they know is a lesbian, Edith befriends a drag queen, Archie nearly cheats on Edith, and so on. But, for all this parading, political substance was trumped by personal interactions.
In “The Elevator Story,” Archie is trapped in an elevator with a bunch of “ethnic types.” Most vocal among them is an articulate and confident black man. The subject of military service comes up, and Archie assumes that the man must have been on “latrine duty” during the war. When the man reveals that he was an intelligence officer, Archie looks chagrined, and the studio audience laughs at Archie’s embarrassment. Archie is effectively humbled, and by episode’s end the man lets him off the social hook with a noble courtesy. This interchange is ostensibly about racism, but what does it say? Only that Archie is so naïve in his stereotyping that he can’t conceive of intelligent, responsible black people. Institutional racism is not addressed. Archie’s folly is harmful only to Archie himself.
Like so many mass audience successes, All in the Family could be viewed on different levels. Liberals and intellectuals could see their beliefs vindicated, while white conservatives found a new hero and felt the world had acknowledged them. Perhaps more important, Archie spoke to the anxieties of those confused masses in between. When he spoke of “jungle bunnies,” he released a little internal pressure for millions of Americans who felt socially unacceptable hostilities within themselves. Archie was a sacrificial lamb for an angry, frightened, would-be progressive America. There was such an electric tension to the first couple of years of All in the Family that it’s difficult to believe this duality was calculated. It seems to spring from the duality within Norman Lear himself, a common split within sensitive middle-aged progressives. He was an intellectual liberal but an emotional conservative. Whatever he may have thought about social revolution, he yearned for continuity and family.
In the end, it is the emotional, not intellectual, content that bonds an audience with a TV show. Liberals welcomed the overt messages of All in the Family, but it was the Archie Bunkers of America who stayed with the character once the novelty wore off. CBS’s new programing chief, Fred Silverman, must have intuited this. The network had originally dropped it into a dead time slot—Tuesday night at 9:30, opposite ABC’s top-rated Movie of the Week—perhaps to minimize the trouble it could cause. It came in at 58 in the ratings and was considered for cancellation, but the media attention encouraged Bob Wood to give it a push with the start of its first full season. Silverman moved it to 8:00 on Saturday night. That put Archie squarely in the face of the mass TV audience, and that audience made him a tremendous hit. All in the Family topped the Nielsens that season with a 34 rating and remained on top for five straight years.
The success of All in the Family guaranteed a flood of shows breaking taboos, playing with topical issues, pitting family member against family member, featuring political misfits and working-class louts. Along with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, it taught TV entertainment how to grapple humorously with the anxieties of the time and, in so doing, laid the foundation for nearly every sitcom since. For all the success of All in the Family, however, 1970s sitcoms had an increasingly hard time reaching the prime advertising market. The sitcoms that followed it put less emphasis on political dialogue and generational dynamics and steadily more on sex, shock value, sentimentality, and lovable buffoons.
After a few years, All in the Family itself fell prey to its own sentimentality and repetition. But, in its moment of gutsy, self-contradictory glory, it had changed American mass culture. It dared to state that the culture of assimilation and consensus wasn’t working; that communication did not necessarily dissolve our differences—in the Bunker household, communication just leads to a lot of yelling. Yet, as pessimistic as it was about the modern world, it was optimistic about the basic nature of people and families. Without offering any solutions to social ills, it showed the Bunkers holding together, episode after episode, by foolish love alone.
No comments:
Post a Comment