President Named in All in the Family. Theme
The Show That Changed Tv set Forever
All in the Family was the kickoff program to genuinely reckon with the cultural upheaval of 1960s America. TV would never be the same.
Adapted from Rock Me on the Water, HarperCollins Publishers, 2021.
Due westhen CBS first placed All in the Family unit on the air, on January 12, 1971, it irrevocably transformed television. After a shaky commencement season in which it struggled to find an audience, the show prospered, rising to become No. ane in the ratings for v sequent years, a tape unmatched at the time. All in the Family unit commanded national attention to a degree almost impossible 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 evidence punctured or promoted bigotry.
Its success non only helped lift The Mary Tyler Moore Bear witness, Thousand*A*S*H, and the other great topical comedies of the early 1970s, but as well cemented the thought that television could be used to annotate meaningfully on the gild around it—an thought the networks had uniformly rejected throughout all the upheaval of the 1960s. That legacy—the determination to connect the medium to the moment—reverberates through shows as diverse as Fleabag, Atlanta, Breaking Bad, The Wire, and endless others. The dark that CBS initially aired All in the Family was the first step on the road toward the Peak Tv set that we are living through today.
All in the Family condensed the "generation gap" of the 1960s into a unmarried living room. It pitted Mike Stivic, a long-haired liberal, and his married woman, the bubbly Gloria, against Gloria'due south begetter, Archie Bunker, a reactionary bigot and Richard Nixon–loving dockworker—as Edith, the daffy but benevolent married woman and mother, looked on. Incarnated past a stellar cast and energized by vivid writing and directing, information technology became a television landmark, widely lauded as 1 of the greatest and most influential shows always.
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 before All in the Family unit, shows that tried to achieve more relevance had almost all failed, by and large because they were too laden with good intentions to concenter an audience. That All in the Family not but reached the air only prospered was the result of 2 men: Norman Lear, its staunchly liberal creator, and Robert D. Wood, the bourgeois president of CBS, who put information technology on the schedule. That act revolutionized television, but both men were unlikely revolutionaries.
Norman Lear was the son of a man whose dreams dissolved quickly but whose resentments outlived him in the work of his son. Herman Lear was a minor-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. Afterwards, they would get Lear's 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 two 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 beat his fists confronting his chest and blare at Lear's mother, "Jeanette, stifle yourself."
Like many children of the Corking Low, Lear establish direction and structure in the war machine. After globe-trotting through a few semesters at Emerson College, in Boston, he enlisted in the Army Air Force post-obit Pearl Harbor and flew dozens of bombing missions over Germany. Subsequently 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 baby daughter into a 1946 Oldsmobile convertible and pointed it toward Los Angeles. There, he hoped for a fresh start, just struggled to observe work. He was reduced to selling article of furniture and babe photos door-to-door with a man named Ed Simmons, an aspiring comedy writer who was the husband of Lear's cousin.
1 night, Lear helped Simmons cease a parody of a popular vocal he had been writing. When they found a nightclub singer to buy the vocal, their payday was merely $40 betwixt them, but that was enough to convince the 2 to drop their salesman'south satchels and plunge into a full-time writing partnership. Presently after, they caught the attending of industry insiders and began writing for an early on television-variety show.
Through the 1950s, Lear's career advanced in step with the growth of television itself. These were the years of television's so-called gilded historic period, when earnest dramas such as The Philco Boob tube Playhouse groomed a steady stream of immature directors for Hollywood. Lear marinated in the other smashing boob tube product of those years: the star-led variety shows, such as Sid Caesar's Your Testify of Shows, that drew on traditions of vaudeville and radio one-act.
Lear thrived in this world. He began to ricochet between Los Angeles and New York, mastering the breakneck pace of television receiver production—he survived the constant deadlines, he afterwards 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, absorbing the rhythms of sketches that had to quickly grip an audience'south 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 ended their partnership, and Lear took up with the manager Bud Yorkin, with whom he created a product company that developed both television programs and movies for Paramount.
Some of these films (including Come Accident Your Horn and Divorce American Style) managed respectable box-office returns, but none generated much critical excitement. No reviewers saw in the Lear and Yorkin movies, or their succession of goggle box specials with soft-edged mainstream entertainers, the contour of anything new. Looking back, 1 Hollywood executive described them in those years as "yeoman producers, just guys that would get their heads downwards and exercise the piece of work." Little of Lear'due south work in the 1960s signaled that he had much to say virtually the fashion America was transforming around him. "Hither'due 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."
Within a few years, millions would agree, but not until Lear met another Earth War II veteran who was an fifty-fifty more than unlikely candidate to transform the nature of tv set.
The career of Robert D. Wood, the CBS executive who ultimately put All in the Family on the air, proceeded about exactly in parallel with Lear's. While Lear served in the Regular army Air Force during World State of war Ii, Wood spent iii years in the Navy, including time in the South Pacific. Afterward the war, he graduated with a caste in advertising from the University of Southern California in 1949, the same twelvemonth Lear arrived in Los Angeles with his young family.
Wood started his career in advertizing sales for the CBS radio affiliate in L.A., KNX. Past 1960, he'd risen upwards the ranks to go vice president and manager of the network'south local telly affiliate. His elevation to that part anointed him as a prince in the CBS empire. The affiliate, KNXT, was one of the five Television stations around the country that the federal government permitted CBS to own and operate direct during this menses. These "O&O stations" were concentrated in the largest markets and generated enormous profits. CBS granted great autonomy to O&O general managers like Wood and marked them as futurity leaders. The network also pushed managers to deliver on-air editorials, like those in local newspapers, simply left them about entirely free to make up one's mind the content.
Wood thrived in this office. "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 great presence." Forest hired Howard Williams, an editorial writer from the conservative Los Angeles Mirror, to assist him develop the station's editorial line.
Wood was a gregarious boss, with a salesman's effortless capacity to make friends and create camaraderie. He knew everybody's name and had fourth dimension 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 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 starting time demonstrations by the free-speech movement erupted at UC Berkeley, Wood, in ane of his on-air editorials, called the demonstrators "witless agitators" and insisted that they "be dealt with quickly and severely to set an case for all time to those who agitate for the sake of agitation."
A few years afterward, CBS promoted Wood over again, relocating him to the East Coast, where he took on a succession of top-level jobs. In early 1969, Wood was named president of the CBS Television Network, the company's highest-ranking television position.
This promotion placed him atop the most powerful and assisting of the three television receiver 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 part, Wood entered a Mad Men environment that appeared frozen in time. This was a more urbane, cosmopolitan, and cutthroat world than the domesticated bicycle of Junior League dinners and weekends at the beach that Wood had left behind in Los Angeles. Just he took to it naturally. To many around him, Wood came across as the Westward Coast equivalent of an Ivy Leaguer, confident and smooth, if no intellectual; he was ever more than comfy discussing football game than philosophy.
Simply for all the ability and profitability that CBS projected through the tardily '60s, information technology couldn't entirely ignore the social changes of the era. CBS faced disruption from the aforementioned demographic-driven transformation of its audience that had staggered the film studios and sent weekly admissions in film theaters plummeting through the '50s and '60s. Like Hollywood, the tv networks faced a growing disconnection between their musty products and the immature Infant Boomers whose swelling numbers and growing buying power were reshaping the marketplace for popular culture. And Wood, with his grounding in Los Angeles, felt the tremors earlier than about anyone else around him.
In 1961, Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, disparaged television as "a vast wasteland." But he would take been just as accurate to phone 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 rise 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 to the lowest degree objectionable program" that could draw the most diverse viewership. In do, this translated into shows that would be acceptable non only to urban sophisticates but also to small-town traditionalists. So, off the CBS assembly line flowed a procession of bland 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 by aging figures from the '50s and even earlier, such as Ed Sullivan and Lucille Ball. Each dark, CBS chronicled the tumultuous strains trigger-happy at America on Walter Cronkite's newscast so spent the adjacent 3 and a half hours of prime time trying to erase them from viewers' minds.
CBS's beginning effort to reflect the changing culture came in 1967, when information technology premiered The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. 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 act that combined stand up-upwardly comedy with gentle parodies of folk music. Their testify was a hit from the outset and quickly became the ane spot on idiot box that seemed conscious of the burgeoning youth civilization. Cutting-border bands such as Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, The Who, and Simon and Garfunkel all appeared.
As the show's audience grew, Tom Smothers in particular became adamant to use the platform to deliver a distinctly liberal message virtually gimmicky issues, especially the Vietnam War. Tom said, "There's no point of being on idiot box … at this point in time, with what'southward going on in this country, and non reflect what's going on," recalled Rob Reiner, the time to come All in the Family unit star, who joined the show for role of its concluding flavor every bit a writer. 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. Woods canceled the evidence in early on April 1969, less than ii months after he'd assumed the network'southward presidency.
The cancellation underscored the difficulty of changing CBS. Merely 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: immature, affluent consumers in urban centers. "It was the sales department that said if we desire to be competitive, we ought to try to become a younger contour with our audition," said Cistron Jankowski, a CBS ad executive who later became the network'due south president.
Wood 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 leave his mark on the culture. He didn't talk about the network as a public trust; he saw it, unsentimentally, more often than not as a vehicle to sell soap and cars. Michael Ovitz, then a young amanuensis, recalled that no one in the artistic community looked to Forest for insight. "He never read a script," Ovitz said. "And if he did, no i cared what he had to say about it." Neither did Forest feel any urge to provide a platform for the new voices and social movements agitating for change: Even after he moved to more liberal New York Urban center, his politics remained anchored well correct of center. Irwin Segelstein, a top CBS programming executive, later said of Wood, "Bob is really Archie Bunker. The radical-correct Irish gaelic bourgeois."
But the advertising department institute Wood receptive to its arguments for a new direction. I solar day in Feb 1970, Woods 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 Like shooting fish in a barrel Rider. "A sure genre of films were pulling young people abroad," Forest said later. "I sensed a shift in the national mood." Woods knew he needed a program that would brand a loud statement in social club to concenter new viewers. He "wanted to get some show that would cause some conversation," recalled Perry Lafferty, the former director and producer serving as CBS'due south vice president for programming in Hollywood. Norman Lear, during the first two decades of his bear witness-business career, had displayed neither much interest nor much facility in generating chat, merely Lear would provide Forest exactly what he was looking for, and and so some.
All in the Family began as a British idiot box bear witness titled Till Decease Us Do Part, the story of a working-class bigot, his sharp-tongued married woman, their girl, and her husband. Information technology caused a sensation in Britain for its frank treatment of racism and other previously taboo topics, and its potential as a template for an American testify seemed obvious. Just when CBS tried to learn 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 begetter and the liberal son-in-police force reminded him of his own struggles with his father, Herman. In tardily summer 1968, he acquired the rights to the project and secured a contract from ABC to develop a pilot.
Lear did non begin adapting Till Death with whatsoever ambition to transform television. "I have never, e'er remembered thinking, Oh, nosotros're doing something outlandish, riotously dissimilar," he recalled. "I wasn't on whatsoever mission. And I don't recall I knew I was breaking such basis. I didn't watch Petticoat Junction, for Chrissake. I didn't sentry Beverly Hillbillies. I didn't know what I was doing." To the extent that he had an ulterior motive, information technology was more financial than artistic: Lear was attracted to owning a situation comedy that would provide a lasting stream of revenue if it were syndicated for reruns.
Lear moved quickly to write, bandage, and moving picture a airplane pilot for the show, 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 name, but both had worked steadily: O'Connor had been a graphic symbol actor in dozens of movies and television shows through the '60s, and Stapleton had worked on Broadway and in tv. Lear cast two lesser-known younger actors as Mike and Gloria, and shot a pilot in late September 1968. ABC, however, rejected it—as well as a 2d, redo pilot he shot a year afterward.
Lear's agent pushed the concept to CBS. Woods was initially hesitant, only soon recognized that he had found his conversation starter. He subsequently explained his thinking to the sociologist Todd Gitlin: "I really thought the pilot was very, very funny … Information technology certain seemed to me a terrific manner to exam this whole mental attitude about the network." Just a year after Wood buried the Smothers Brothers, he gave new life to Archie Bunker.
Fifty-fifty with Wood's support, the show faced formidable headwinds within CBS. William Paley, the autocratic chairman of the board, hated information technology from the outset, considering it vulgar. Just Wood was determined. "Bob Wood had balls," said James Rosenfield, an advertizing salesman at the time who went on to become the president of CBS. "He actually had balls, and what I never understood to this 24-hour interval was how that happened, because Bob Wood came out of sales. He didn't take any clout with the Hollywood community. He didn't know Norman Lear, only he understood that there was an opportunity here for significant change in the medium, and he made information technology happen."
With the go-ahead from CBS, Lear reshaped the bandage with new choices for the younger roles. For Gloria, the Bunkers' daughter, he chose Sally Struthers, a immature blonde whom Lear had seen on the Smothers Brothers and in the movie 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 improver 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 changing youth culture, on individual episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies and Gomer Pyle. "I was like the resident Hollywood hippie," Reiner said later.
For the managing director, Lear chose John Rich, a skilled idiot box veteran whom he had met two decades earlier. Coincidentally, Rich had been approached at near exactly the same time to direct The Mary Tyler Moore Evidence, which preceded All in the Family on the air at CBS past four months. While Mary was pathbreaking in its ain, quieter fashion—illustrating the changing roles of women in American lodge through deft and affectionate graphic symbol studies—to Rich the show didn't appear nearly as revolutionary as Lear's projection. "It was 1970, and the dialogue that was written then merely blew me away," Rich remembered. "And I called Norman … I said, 'You lot 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 will.'"
Rich'south uncertainty, even incredulity, was widely shared. Fifty-fifty with CBS's blessing, the show's hereafter always seemed tenuous to the cast and crew as they worked toward their January 1971 premiere. "We knew we were doing something good, but we didn't think anybody was going to become for this," Reiner remembered. O'Connor was 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 commencement-grade ticket back if the testify was canceled.
Lear, as well, felt that CBS's delivery was only provisional. Aye, Wood had bought the show, merely he remained skittish about it. "He wanted to take a chance, but he fought me tooth and smash," Lear remembered. Wood and CBS were only uncertain that a show this unlike from their usual programming would observe an audience. "That'south all they worried about," Lear said. "Information technology's as uncomplicated equally 'We 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 Woods stopped by the set. "I promise you know what you're doing," he told the director, "because my rump is on the line here." Only weeks before the show was scheduled to air, CBS even so had failed to sell whatsoever advertising to air with it.
From the first, Lear participated in an unrelenting push and pull with the CBS censors over the evidence's language and content. The network'southward caution was evident in the time slot information technology selected for the show: Tuesday, a dark it didn't view equally pivotal, at 9:thirty p.m., betwixt Hee Haw and the CBS News 60 minutes. In advance of the premiere, Forest sent a telegram to CBS affiliates quoting a speech he'd delivered the previous spring: "We take to broaden our base of operations," he wrote. "We have to concenter new viewers. We're going to operate on the theory that it is improve to try something new than non to try information technology and wonder what would have happened if nosotros had."
CBS even developed an unusual disclaimer to appear but before the bear witness's commencement 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 show—in a mature mode—just how absurd they are." To the cast, the disclaimer "was ridiculous, because they're putting the bear witness on the air, and yet they're trying to distance themselves from the evidence at the same time," Reiner remembered.
CBS's ambivalence crystallized into a unmarried choice: which episode to air beginning. Lear wanted to first with the third version of the pilot, which he had taped with the new bandage. Viewed even decades subsequently, the episode is explosive. Summoning painful memories, viscerally connected to his characters, Lear, then in his mid-40s, plant in his script a passionate and urgent vox he had never before tapped. Inside minutes, Archie is raging against "your spics and your spades"; complaining almost "Hebes" and "Blackness beauties"; calling Edith a "featherbrained dingbat" and telling her to "stifle" herself; and describing Mike as a "dumb Polack" and "the laziest white man I've ever seen"—the latter a reprise of an insult that Herman Lear used to directly at his son. Mike, only as heatedly, is blaming law-breaking on poverty and insisting that he and Gloria see no show that God exists. In the opening scene, Archie and Edith get in home early from church and catch Mike kissing Gloria amorously as he carries her toward the bedroom. Archie is scandalized: "11:10 on a Sunday morning time," 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 immature couple was on their way to take sex (during daylight, no less). The network insisted that Lear have it out; he refused. Forest offered a compromise: The line could stay in if Lear agreed to button the pilot episode back to the second week and run the projected second prove first. Lear refused again. He believed the pilot episode presented "Archie in full," with all his prejudices and animosities on open up display. Airing information technology was similar jumping into the deep finish of a pool; CBS and Lear together would "get fully wet the first time out," equally Lear later described it. In what would become a common occurrence, Lear told Woods he would quit if CBS started with the second episode.
On Jan 12, 1971, the date that All in the Family was scheduled to appear for the first time, Rich and the crew were performing a dress rehearsal for the season'southward 6th episode in the CBS complex known as Television receiver Urban center, at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Artery in Los Angeles. Just before 6:xxx California fourth dimension, they crowded into Rich's small command room, where they could lookout man a network feed as the show's 9:30 eastern airtime approached. They might have caught the final minutes of Hee Haw, a last vestige of television's obsession with rural audiences, before the control room filled with the disembodied voice reading CBS's strange disclaimer. And then came the sounds of Jean Stapleton at the piano as she and Carroll O'Connor sang the evidence'due south nostalgic theme song, "Those Were the Days." Still, it wasn't articulate yet 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, the initial scenes of the pilot. The CBS centre had blinked. Television'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 emerge some of the greatest television e'er made.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/03/how-all-family-changed-american-tv-forever/618353/
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