All in the Family What Time Does It Start Tonight
The Testify That Changed Television Forever
All in the Family was the first program to genuinely reckon with the cultural upheaval of 1960s America. Idiot box would never be the same.
Adapted from Rock Me on the H2o, HarperCollins Publishers, 2021.
Westhen CBS first placed All in the Family on the air, on January 12, 1971, it irrevocably transformed idiot box. Afterward a shaky first season in which information technology struggled to discover an audience, the show prospered, rising to become No. one in the ratings for five sequent years, a record unmatched at the time. All in the Family commanded national attention to a caste nigh incommunicable to imagine in today's fractionated entertainment landscape. Archie Bunker's catchwords—stifle, meathead, and dingbat—all became national shorthand. Scholars earnestly debated whether the prove punctured or promoted bigotry.
Its success non only helped lift The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*Southward*H, and the other great topical comedies of the early 1970s, merely besides cemented the idea that idiot box could be used to comment meaningfully on the society around information technology—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 every bit various equally Fleabag, Atlanta, Breaking Bad, The Wire, and countless others. The night that CBS initially aired All in the Family was the starting time footstep on the road toward the Peak Television set that nosotros are living through today.
All in the Family condensed the "generation gap" of the 1960s into a unmarried living room. Information technology pitted Mike Stivic, a long-haired liberal, and his wife, the bubbly Gloria, confronting Gloria's father, Archie Bunker, a reactionary bigot and Richard Nixon–loving dockworker—every bit Edith, the daffy but benevolent wife and mother, looked on. Incarnated past a stellar bandage and energized by brilliant writing and directing, it became a television landmark, widely lauded as i 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 information technology twice. And earlier All in the Family, shows that tried to achieve more relevance had most all failed, mostly because they were too laden with expert intentions to attract an audience. That All in the Family unit non only reached the air but 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, but both men were unlikely revolutionaries.
Due northorman 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-fourth dimension salesman and entrepreneur, and a fountain of dubious get-rich-quick schemes. His wife, Jeanette, co-ordinate to Norman, was cocky-absorbed, discontented, and, like her husband, volatile. Afterward, they would become Lear'due south early models for Archie and Edith Bunker. Throughout his childhood in Connecticut and Brooklyn, Lear's parents immersed him in an surround of barely controlled chaos. The ii of them, Lear would often say, "lived at the ends of their nerves and the tops of their lungs." At the peak of argument, the veins in his neck bulging, Lear's father would vanquish his fists against his chest and bellow at Lear's mother, "Jeanette, stifle yourself."
Similar many children of the Not bad Depression, Lear found management and structure in the war machine. After drifting through a few semesters at Emerson College, in Boston, he enlisted in the Ground forces Air Force post-obit Pearl Harbor and flew dozens of bombing missions over Deutschland. After a few years working as a Broadway press agent and, later, for his begetter, Lear made a decision that proved a turning point: He loaded his wife and infant daughter into a 1946 Oldsmobile convertible and pointed it toward Los Angeles. There, he hoped for a fresh start, but struggled to find work. He was reduced to selling furniture and baby photos door-to-door with a man named Ed Simmons, an aspiring one-act author who was the husband of Lear'due south cousin.
Ane dark, Lear helped Simmons end a parody of a pop song he had been writing. When they found a nightclub singer to buy the song, their payday was only $forty betwixt them, but that was enough to convince the two to drib their salesman'south satchels and plunge into a total-time writing partnership. Soon subsequently, they caught the attending of industry insiders and began writing for an early goggle box-variety prove.
Through the 1950s, Lear's career avant-garde in footstep with the growth of television itself. These were the years of television's and so-called golden age, when hostage dramas such as The Philco Television Playhouse groomed a steady stream of young directors for Hollywood. Lear marinated in the other great television product of those years: the star-led variety shows, such as Sid Caesar's Your Prove of Shows, that drew on traditions of vaudeville and radio comedy.
Lear thrived in this globe. He began to ricochet between Los Angeles and New York, mastering the breakneck pace of television production—he survived the constant deadlines, he afterward 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 quickly grip an audience's attention between singers and dancing acts.
His work was skilled and professional, and his shows were sufficiently successful to constantly open up new doors for him. Eventually, he and Simmons concluded their partnership, and Lear took upward 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 Blow Your Horn and Divorce American Fashion) managed respectable box-role returns, just 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 contour of anything new. Looking back, one Hollywood executive described them in those years as "yeoman producers, just guys that would become their heads down and do the work." Fiddling of Lear's work in the 1960s signaled that he had much to say about the way America was transforming effectually him. "Here'south 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 proficient than the things he was doing."
Inside a few years, millions would concur, only not until Lear met another World War II veteran who was an even more than unlikely candidate to transform the nature of boob tube.
The career of Robert D. Wood, the CBS executive who ultimately put All in the Family on the air, proceeded almost exactly in parallel with Lear's. While Lear served in the Army Air Force during World War II, Wood spent three years in the Navy, including time in the Due south Pacific. After the state of war, he graduated with a caste in advertizing from the University of Southern California in 1949, the aforementioned year Lear arrived in Los Angeles with his young family unit.
Wood started his career in advert sales for the CBS radio affiliate in 50.A., KNX. By 1960, he'd risen up the ranks to become vice president and manager of the network's local television affiliate. His elevation to that role anointed him as a prince in the CBS empire. The affiliate, KNXT, was one of the 5 TV stations effectually the country that the federal government permitted CBS to ain and operate directly during this period. These "O&O stations" were full-bodied in the largest markets and generated enormous profits. CBS granted dandy autonomy to O&O general managers similar Woods and marked them as future leaders. The network as well pushed managers to evangelize on-air editorials, similar those in local newspapers, but left them about entirely free to determine the content.
Wood thrived in this role. "He was really proud of being the editorial vocalisation, the guy who appeared in the editorials, and he was skillful at it," recalled Pete Noyes, a prominent news producer at KNXT in those years. "He had a groovy presence." Wood hired Howard Williams, an editorial writer from the bourgeois Los Angeles Mirror, to help him develop the station's editorial line.
Wood was a gregarious boss, with a salesman'due south effortless chapters to brand friends and create camaraderie. He knew everybody'south 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 bourgeois, reflecting the center of gravity in L.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 start demonstrations by the free-voice communication movement erupted at UC Berkeley, Woods, in one of his on-air editorials, called the demonstrators "witless agitators" and insisted that they "be dealt with quickly and severely to set an example for all time to those who arouse for the sake of agitation."
A few years later, CBS promoted Woods again, relocating him to the East Coast, where he took on a succession of top-level jobs. In early on 1969, Wood was named president of the CBS Television Network, the visitor's highest-ranking television position.
This promotion placed him atop the almost powerful and profitable of the 3 television networks. CBS's 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-floor office, Forest entered a Mad Men environment that appeared frozen in time. This was a more urbane, cosmopolitan, and cutthroat world than the domesticated cycle of Junior League dinners and weekends at the beach that Wood had left behind in Los Angeles. But he took to information technology naturally. To many effectually him, Wood came across every bit the West Declension equivalent of an Ivy Leaguer, confident and smooth, if no intellectual; he was always more comfortable discussing football than philosophy.
Simply for all the ability and profitability that CBS projected through the tardily '60s, it couldn't entirely ignore the social changes of the era. CBS faced disruption from the same demographic-driven transformation of its audition that had staggered the motion-picture show 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 between their musty products and the immature Babe Boomers whose swelling numbers and growing ownership power were reshaping the market place for popular civilization. And Wood, with his grounding in Los Angeles, felt the tremors earlier than near anyone else around him.
Inorth 1961, Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, disparaged television as "a vast wasteland." But he would have been just as accurate to call it "a vast cornfield."
Through the 1960s, the networks stubbornly looked away from the simultaneous earthquakes disrupting American life: the ceremonious-rights and antiwar movements, the nightly carnage of Vietnam, the ascent 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 every bit "the least objectionable plan" that could draw the most diverse viewership. In exercise, this translated into shows that would be adequate not simply to urban sophisticates but too to small-town traditionalists. So, off the CBS assembly line flowed a procession of banal comedies celebrating the elementary wisdom of rural life, including The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Testify. Surrounding them were variety shows and comedies led past aging figures from the '50s and fifty-fifty earlier, such equally Ed Sullivan and Lucille Brawl. Each night, CBS chronicled the tumultuous strains tearing at America on Walter Cronkite's newscast and and then spent the next 3 and a half hours of prime time trying to erase them from viewers' minds.
CBS's first attempt to reflect the changing civilization came in 1967, when it premiered The Smothers Brothers Comedy 60 minutes. The Smothers Brothers, Tom the leader and Dick the straight human, were a modestly successful duo who had built an audience through albums and a nightclub deed that combined stand-up comedy with gentle parodies of folk music. Their show was a hit from the outset and quickly became the one spot on television that seemed conscious of the burgeoning youth culture. Cutting-edge bands such as Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, The Who, and Simon and Garfunkel all appeared.
Equally the show'southward audience grew, Tom Smothers in item became determined to use the platform to deliver a distinctly liberal message most contemporary problems, especially the Vietnam War. Tom said, "There'south no point of being on television … at this signal in time, with what's going on in this land, and not reflect what's going on," recalled Rob Reiner, the futurity All in the Family star, who joined the evidence for role of its concluding flavor as a writer. CBS censors predictably recoiled, snipping lines from some segments and rejecting others completely. The show had supporters within CBS, just the network's senior leadership grew weary of the abiding arguments. Wood canceled the evidence in early April 1969, less than two months after he'd assumed the network'south presidency.
The cancellation underscored the difficulty of changing CBS. Just pressure for a new approach was edifice, and it came, surprisingly, from the network's business staff. CBS had the biggest audiences, merely ABC and NBC were successfully wooing advertisers with their arguments that they had amend audiences: young, affluent consumers in urban centers. "It was the sales section that said if we want to be competitive, we ought to try to get a younger contour with our audience," said Gene Jankowski, a CBS ad executive who later became the network's president.
Woods 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 promise to leave his mark on the civilization. He didn't talk about the network every bit a public trust; he saw it, unsentimentally, mostly as a vehicle to sell soap and cars. Michael Ovitz, and so a young amanuensis, recalled that no 1 in the creative community looked to Wood for insight. "He never read a script," Ovitz said. "And if he did, no ane cared what he had to say about it." Neither did Wood feel any urge to provide a platform for the new voices and social movements agitating for change: Even after he moved to more than liberal New York City, his politics remained anchored well correct of heart. Irwin Segelstein, a top CBS programming executive, later said of Wood, "Bob is really Archie Bunker. The radical-right Irish bourgeois."
But the advertizing section establish Wood receptive to its arguments for a new management. I day in February 1970, Wood came to the sales department and said that CBS had to become 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, similar Easy Passenger. "A certain genre of films were pulling immature people away," Forest 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 concenter new viewers. He "wanted to get some evidence that would crusade some conversation," recalled Perry Lafferty, the former manager and producer serving as CBS's vice president for programming in Hollywood. Norman Lear, during the first ii decades of his evidence-business career, had displayed neither much interest nor much facility in generating chat, but Lear would provide Wood exactly what he was looking for, and then some.
All in the Family began as a British television show titled Till Decease The states Do Office, the story of a working-class bigot, his sharp-tongued married woman, 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 equally a template for an American show seemed obvious. Simply when CBS tried to acquire the American rights to Till Death, information technology discovered that they had already been sold to Norman Lear.
The cloth 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 begetter, Herman. In late summertime 1968, he acquired the rights to the projection and secured a contract from ABC to develop a pilot.
Lear did non brainstorm adapting Till Decease with any appetite to transform television. "I accept never, ever remembered thinking, Oh, we're doing something outlandish, riotously different," he recalled. "I wasn't on whatsoever mission. And I don't think I knew I was breaking such ground. 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 quickly to write, bandage, and pic a airplane pilot for the bear witness, 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, only both had worked steadily: O'Connor had been a character actor in dozens of movies and boob tube shows through the '60s, and Stapleton had worked on Broadway and in television. Lear bandage two lesser-known younger actors as Mike and Gloria, and shot a pilot in tardily September 1968. ABC, however, rejected it—also equally a 2d, redo pilot he shot a yr later.
Lear'due south agent pushed the concept to CBS. Wood was initially hesitant, simply presently recognized that he had found his conversation starter. He later explained his thinking to the sociologist Todd Gitlin: "I really thought the pilot was very, very funny … It sure seemed to me a terrific fashion to test this whole attitude about the network." Just a yr later on Wood cached the Smothers Brothers, he gave new life to Archie Bunker.
Even with Wood'south support, the show faced formidable headwinds within CBS. William Paley, the autocratic chairman of the board, hated it from the starting time, considering it vulgar. But Forest was adamant. "Bob Wood had balls," said James Rosenfield, an ad salesman at the time who went on to become the president of CBS. "He actually had assurance, and what I never understood to this twenty-four hours was how that happened, considering Bob Wood came out of sales. He didn't take whatever clout with the Hollywood community. He didn't know Norman Lear, but he understood that there was an opportunity here for significant change in the medium, and he made information technology happen."
With the get-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 movie Five Like shooting fish in a barrel Pieces. For Mike, the son-in-police, Lear looked closer to habitation, 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 option for the industry's stilted first attempts to acknowledge the irresolute youth civilization, on individual episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies and Gomer Pyle. "I was like the resident Hollywood hippie," Reiner said subsequently.
For the director, Lear chose John Rich, a skilled television veteran whom he had met two decades earlier. Coincidentally, Rich had been approached at almost exactly the same time to straight The Mary Tyler Moore Bear witness, which preceded All in the Family on the air at CBS past four months. While Mary was pathbreaking in its own, quieter mode—illustrating the changing roles of women in American society through deft and affectionate character studies—to Rich the testify didn't appear nearly as revolutionary as Lear's project. "Information technology was 1970, and the dialogue that was written then just blew me abroad," Rich remembered. "And I called Norman … I said, 'You lot aren't going to make this, are y'all?' He said, 'Yeah.' I said, 'Is everyone going to put it on?' He said, 'They say they will.'"
Rich's uncertainty, even incredulity, was widely shared. Even with CBS's approving, the show's futurity always seemed tenuous to the bandage and crew as they worked toward their January 1971 premiere. "We knew we were doing something good, but nosotros didn't retrieve 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 made Lear promise to pay for a get-go-course ticket back if the show was canceled.
Lear, too, felt that CBS'south delivery was just conditional. Yes, Wood had bought the show, but he remained skittish well-nigh it. "He wanted to have a risk, but he fought me molar and boom," Lear remembered. Wood and CBS were simply uncertain that a show this different from their usual programming would find an audience. "That's all they worried nigh," Lear said. "It'south equally elementary every bit 'Nosotros don't know if this works.' We know the Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction—we know that works. We don't know if this works." During the filming of an early episode, Rich was in the control room when Wood stopped by the set. "I hope you know what you're doing," he told the manager, "because my rump is on the line here." Just weeks before the show was scheduled to air, CBS yet had failed to sell any ad to air with it.
From the start, Lear participated in an unrelenting push and pull with the CBS censors over the testify's linguistic communication and content. The network'southward caution was evident in the time slot it selected for the prove: Tuesday, a night information technology didn't view as pivotal, at 9:xxx p.m., between Hee Haw and the CBS News Hour. In advance of the premiere, Woods sent a telegram to CBS affiliates quoting a spoken communication he'd delivered the previous spring: "Nosotros accept to broaden our base," he wrote. "Nosotros accept to attract new viewers. We're going to operate on the theory that it is better to attempt something new than non to try it and wonder what would have happened if nosotros had."
CBS even developed an unusual disclaimer to appear just earlier the bear witness's offset episode, explaining that All in the Family "seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to bear witness—in a mature fashion—only how absurd they are." To the cast, the disclaimer "was ridiculous, considering they're putting the testify on the air, and yet they're trying to distance themselves from the prove at the aforementioned time," Reiner remembered.
CBS's ambiguity crystallized into a single choice: which episode to air outset. Lear wanted to start with the third version of the pilot, which he had taped with the new cast. Viewed even decades later, the episode is explosive. Summoning painful memories, viscerally connected to his characters, Lear, so in his mid-40s, plant in his script a passionate and urgent phonation 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 "empty-headed 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, just every bit heatedly, is blaming crime on poverty and insisting that he and Gloria come across no bear witness that God exists. In the opening scene, Archie and Edith go far home early from church and grab Mike kissing Gloria amorously as he carries her toward the bedroom. Archie is scandalized: "11:10 on a Dominicus morning," he grumbles in his thick Queens patois.
This was all a bit much for CBS, specially the "Sunday morning" line—which clearly suggested that the young couple was on their way to accept sexual practice (during daylight, no less). The network insisted that Lear take 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 first. Lear refused again. He believed the pilot episode presented "Archie in total," with all his prejudices and animosities on open display. Ambulation it was like jumping into the deep cease of a pool; CBS and Lear together would "become fully wet the offset time out," as Lear afterward described information technology. In what would become a common occurrence, Lear told Wood he would quit if CBS started with the second episode.
On January 12, 1971, the engagement that All in the Family was scheduled to appear for the first fourth dimension, Rich and the crew were performing a dress rehearsal for the season's sixth episode in the CBS complex known as Television Urban center, at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. Just before 6:thirty California fourth dimension, they crowded into Rich'southward pocket-size control room, where they could lookout a network feed as the show's ix:xxx eastern airtime approached. They might have caught the final 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's strange disclaimer. So came the sounds of Jean Stapleton at the piano as she and Carroll O'Connor sang the show'due south nostalgic theme song, "Those Were the Days." Notwithstanding, it wasn't clear nonetheless which episode CBS had placed on the air. Within moments came the paradigm of Mike pursuing Gloria in the kitchen and her parents arriving habitation early on from church, the initial scenes of the airplane pilot. The CBS eye had blinked. Telly's search for a new audience had finally torn downward the pall separating it from the tumultuous changes unfolding effectually it. Through that opening would sally some of the greatest idiot box always made.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/03/how-all-family-changed-american-tv-forever/618353/
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