40 Years: Remembering ‘All In the Family’

Mike Stivik: You know, you are totally incomprehensible.
Archie Bunker: Maybe so, but I make a lot of sense. 

In 1972, one year after the premiere of the TV comedy All in the Family (1971-1979) there was a national campaign complete with bumper stickers, buttons and t-shirts to elect the show’s lead character Archie Bunker as President.  Very happy about the incredible cash cow Family’s popularity was generating, series creator Norman Lear was nevertheless shocked that that the bigoted right-wing Archie was becoming a working class hero to many Americans.  Sammy Davis Junior genuinely liked Archie and asked to be on an episode where he played himself.  At one point Sammy joked to the Bunker’s young neighbor Lionel Jefferson (Mike Evans) that his fellow Republican Archie might toast a marshmallow on a burning cross, but Sammy generally seemed to get that Archie was simply misguided and basically decent.  (Glossed over was the fact that most racist cross burners in this country have traditionally been Democrats.)

Lear had been inspired to create All in the Family after reading about a British comedy Till Us Death Do Part   (1965-1975); the reactionary, anti-socialist father on the English show hit close to home.  Growing up Norman had felt his father Herbert had been wrong about practically everything.  King Lear had sat in a leather chair on Saturday nights perched in front of the TV, putting down people who weren’t white, calling his wife a dingbat and telling her to “stifle herself”, all biographical elements which were incorporated into the new program.  The casting process had been full of twists and turns; at one point Mickey Rooney had been set to play the lead, then had been dismissed after wanting to change the premise to make Archie a Vietnam veteran who was now a detective with a dog. Dublin theater veteran and former New York City public school teacher John Carroll O’Connor replaced the Mick.  O’Connor’s stage experience, writing skills, and perhaps general fear of playing such a lighting rod character led him to question nearly every script often driving Lear and his team of writers crazy, though both sides were usually pleased with the finished results. 

Damn Yankees actress Jean Stapleton, who had never been a regular in a television series, turned down a chance to be Mike Teavee’s mom in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) to play Archie’s long-suffering but loving wife Edith.  When the second pilot episode was filmed in New York City, where people were generally in a hurry, Stapleton came up with the idea that Edith would constantly be running everywhere.  As time went on Edith became more nasally sounding, more naïve and loving and was generally considered to be the wisest character on the show.  After two initial pairs of young actors failed to click in the pilots, Lear hired the prematurely balding son of his old friend Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner, to play the freeloading, disapproving son-in-law Mike, and the highly energetic Sally Struthers, who had formerly worked as a cleaning lady in a movie theater before doing a nude sex scene with Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces (1970), to play daughter Gloria.

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