Rob Reiner in ‘All in the Family’: A Boundary-Pushing Legacy

From 1964 to 1969, as the war in Vietnam escalated and the weekly body count kept pace with the uptick, one of the most popular shows on network television was CBS’ Gomer Pyle, USMC. A sort-of spinoff from The Andy Griffith Showit starred the character actor (and gifted baritone) Jim Nabors as a goofy, good-natured jarhead (“Gol-lee!”) who tormented his easy-to-exasperate drill sergeant, played by Frank Sutton. At no point in the 150 episodes that chronicled Private Pyle’s five years within the safe perimeters of Camp Henderson, CA, was the war in Vietnam, then at napalm-hot intensity, mentioned.

The reality-avoidance was indicative of the vast no-go zones in American television when three networks determined the menu of viewing options and the youngest sibling functioned as the remote-control device. The ethos of “family entertainment” meant that prime time programming should never unduly disturb anyone in the family.

Until, that is, All in the Family shredded the prime-time contract. Debuting on January 12, 1971 and telecast, in its classic iteration, from 1971 to 1978, the show proved that family entertainment was whatever the family watched. “All in the Family changed the course of television comedy,” declared Tim Books and Earle Marsh, without hyperbole, in their Complete Directory of Prime-Time Network TV Shows. As we have had heart-wrenching reason to recall, it was also the show that marked our first introduction to an entertainer who deserves that most hackneyed of showbiz compliments: beloved.

Repurposed for stateside consumption from the BBC series Till Death Us Do Part, All in the Family was created by Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, both alumni of the legendary live variety show (“vaudeo”) format of the 1950s. The two met while working on the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis takeover of NBC’s The Colgate Comedy Hour (1950-1955), where Yorkin was stage manager and associate director and Lear a writer. They hit it off, teamed up, and in 1959 formed Tandem Productions. The usual division of labor had Lear as producer and writer and Yorkin as director. The company developed a successful series of lightweight feature films — Come Blow Your Horn (1963), Never Too Late (1965), and Divorce American Style (1967) — and a slew of television specials (Andy Williams, Danny Kaye, Bobby Darin). In 1969, Lear performed double duty by writing and directing Cold Turkeynot released until 1971, a social satire about the nation’s most lethal drug addiction: a tobacco company offers a small Iowa town $25,000,000 if all the citizens give up smoking for a month.

At around the same time, Lear and Yorkin had another project on the burner, originally titled Those Were the Days. A pilot — self-financed to the tune of $250,000 — was in the can, awaiting a green light from ABC. “It’s actually about a bigoted older couple and their relations with a New Left couple, one of whom is their daughter,” Lear explained in 1969. He confided that the bigot was loosely modeled on his Jewish father, who had a short fuse and a rich vocabulary of Yiddish epithets. The son was to be a member of the Students for a Democratic Society. Skittish about the material being “too frankly discussed or depicted for family viewing,” ABC passed on the pilot.

Eyeing its aging audience and hoping to attract new consumer blood, CBS decided to roll the dice. “The network expected states to secede from the union,” Lear recalled.

At first blush, the televisual DNA of All in the Family looked familiar enough, harking back to blue-collar sitcoms like The Life of Riley (1953-1958) and The Honeymooners (1955), a formula that had been a programming staple until advertisers decided a more upscale milieu made a better showroom for selling high-end appliances. However, All in the Family set out to provoke, transgress, and shock, which in 1971 was not difficult to do. Set in Queens, the show was a brash comedy of ill manners revolving around a reluctantly tight knit nuclear unit: blowhard paterfamilias Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor, a character actor ready for the spotlight); his docile, ditzy, and sweet-tempered wife Edith (versatile stage and screen actress Jean Stapleton); pert blonde daughter and daddy’s “little girl” Gloria (newcomer Sally Struthers); and her schlumpy husband Mike (Rob Reiner), a graduate student working on his degree in sociology. The Bunker residence at 704 Hauser St. was a big step up from the cold water flat occupied by Ralph and Alice Kramden in The Honeymoonersbut still zip codes away from Rob and Laura Petrie’s New Frontier dreamhouse in The Dick Van Dyke Show — created by and co-starring Carl Reiner, speaking of televisual DNA — and the decade’s other emblematic sitcom that premiered the previous September, The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977). (The cultural polarity of the two shows is irresistible to television historians: the proles in Queens vs the proto-yuppies in Minneapolis, retro male vs liberated female, braying punch lines vs witty comebacks. Suggestive too is the fact that The Mary Tyler Moore Show was shot on classy film while All in the Family was shot in the lower rent medium of videotape before a “live studio audience” at Television City in Hollywood.)

The signature montage that began each episode — cutesy titling and theme song sung off key by Archie and Edith — was false advertising. The surname should have been a warning: a signpost to the bunker mentality of the man of the house, who spent most of his down time railing against a world changed for the worse, most notably in the sudden uppity visibility of heretofore subaltern tribes. Archie vented his disgust in a rich lexicon of racial and ethnic slurs new to prime-time dialogue. However, Archie — and Lear — stopped short of the most incendiary antisemitic and racial slur. Even if CBS’s office of Standards and Practices allowed it, Lear understood the difference between cutting edge and beyond the pale.

After an uneven start, All in the Family soared to Number 1 in the Nielsen ratings and stayed on top for five years — an unprecedented achievement. It frequently garnered a 55 percent share of the audience, which in 1970s metrics translated into 40-50 million viewers, depending on the number of HUTS (homes using television) that night.

Everyone talked about the show and almost everyone wrote about it. The reviews were — well, not lukewarm. “The best TV comedy since the original The Honeymooners“, said Variety. “Not just the best-written, best directed, and best acted show on television, it is the best show on television,” said TV Guide. The New York Times was no less impassioned but in the opposite direction. “Vulgar and silly. After the disgust-at-first-shock wears off, the vaudeville clinkers passed off as humor are totally predictable.” The The Hollywood Reporter‘s first review of the show characterized All in the Family as “tasteless, crude, and very unfunny.” (THR later recanted, admitting it was a “quality” show and a “comedy of consequence.”)

The salutary or sinister impact of the presence of a “lovable bigot” in the living room spawned countless lengthy thought pieces. Laura Z. Hobson, the author of Gentleman’s Agreementthe anti-antisemitic best-seller published in 1947, struck first. Hobson had some skin in the game because her book had inspired the landmark social problem film, Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), that forced the Production Code Administration to lift its ban, in the interest of ecumenical tolerance, on the utterance of racial and religious slurs on screen. “I have a most peculiar complaint about the bigotry in All in the Family,” she wrote, keeping an ear out for what was left unsaid. “There’s not enough of it.” By that, she meant that Lear was a risk-averse poseur: a real-world Archie Bunker would not stifle himself from spewing the worst slur for Jews and Blacks, respectively. “How about showing the real thing for a while, before accepting any more praise for honest shows and honest laughter?”

In a testy response in the New York TimesLear reminded Hobson that he was well acquainted with the many variants of slurs for Jews, including the one she printed, having had them hurled at him all his life. He also knew the one she suggested for Blacks. The words that Hobson wanted spoken, however, “connote real hatred,” and Archie is “not motivated by hatred but fear.” Lear’s justification for Archie’s bigotry never varied. He aimed “to hold a mirror up to our prejudices. We laugh now, swallowing just the littlest bit of truth about ourselves and it sits there for the unconscious to toss about later.”

Of course, Lear didn’t want just to hold a mirror up, he wanted to shatter perspective and inspire progressive change. “Mike is always the one who is making sense,” Lear wrote. “Archie is always foolish. Totally foolish.” In truth, Lear’s deck-stacking could be wearying: if Archie goes on television to editorialize in favor of the Second Amendment, you can be sure that by the end of the episode he will be held up at gunpoint.

Over the years, Archie and Mike sparred over most of the headlines of the day: inflation, unemployment, labor strikes, pop music, movies (Archie went to see Last Tango in Paristhinking it was a musical), and, of course, politics. On the eve of the 1972 presidential election, with predictable partisan allegiances, they butted heads over the candidates. Archie got the worst of it so badly that the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) complained to CBS, not that it mattered to the electorate. After Nixon resigned, Archie stood by his man. “Nixon didn’t lie; he just forgot to tell the truth.”

Almost on a weekly basis, the show opened up new territory on the no-longer-consensus medium. Some of the boundaries broken were trivial (Gloria and Archie each used the taboo word “keister”) and some dead serious (both Gloria and Edith were victims of sexual assault). When Edith found a lump on her breast, thousands of women went in for a check-up. The show that got the most protest letters? “Gloria and Mike Mix It Up,” telecast on January 5, 1974, when Gloria is in the mood but Mike is not. “What are 200 letters when 40 million people are watching a show?” shrugged Lear.

Archie’s most often-used epithet was not controversial: Meathead, his term for son in law Mike, allegedly a lapsed Catholic of Polish extraction, though, as the television critic David Marc noted, he was more suggestive of “a post-Woodstock Jewish graduate student.”

Which made sense, given who played him. Born in 1947, Rob Reiner was, of course, the son of comedy legend Carl Reiner, and seemingly fated by lineage for sitcom fame. A theater kid who preferred the stage to school, he bolted from UCLA to form a comedy troupe with a cadre of other funnymen — Larry Bishop and David Arkin. In 19 68, he got his Writers Guild of America West card. By age 21, Reiner was where all the cool kids wanted to be — in the writers’ room at The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hourthe only countercultural redoubt on Squaresville television. “But I hated it,” he said in 1969. “I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do.”

What he wanted to do was create his own projects. In 1970, he co-wrote, with Philip Mishkin, a short-lived CBS series The Headmasterstarring Andy Griffith as a headmaster of a private high school. It was poorly reviewed and canceled mid-season.

The offer to play Mike on All in the Family — Norman Lear, needless to say, was a family friend — was a lifeline that came with a catch: he was basically the dummy to Lear’s ventriloquist. Mike might have gotten the better of the arguments, but Archie got the better lines. For the thankless task of a straight man, Reiner won two Emmys. Over time, Mike was granted agency and potency as a homeowner (next door to Archie and Edith) and father (baby Joey came along in season 6).

In 1978, the year Archie’s wing-backed chair arrived at the Smithsonian Institution to be displayed alongside such treasured objet d’Americana as Lincoln’s top hat and Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. LouisStrothers and Reiner announced their plans to leave the show. A narrative workaround was concocted in which Mike secured an assistant professorship in sociology at UC Santa Barbara. The show ended with a touching rapprochement between the ideological-generational rivals. “You’ve been like a father to me,” whispers Mike, to the man who had difficulty expressing any emotion except rage. At the taping, Reiner told a reporter “I didn’t have to act. Whatever I felt at the moment, I gave in to. I didn’t have to summon anything.” At the very end, empty nesters Archie — are his eyes watering? — and Edith sat in their chairs, alone and left.

It was an obvious final curtain for the series and Lear wanted to wrap it up. Not so fast, said CBS. “It’s very difficult coming up with new shows and I don’t see why we should deprive the American public of seeing one of their favorite shows,” said CBS entertainment division president Bob Daly — especially when the show was still accruing top ten ratings and CBS had a contract for another year. Lear told TV critics that whatever the new show was, it wouldn’t be All in the Family.

Actually, it was All in the Family for the 1978-1979 season anyway, after which Stapleton packed it in. Rebranded as Archie Bunker’s Place (1979-1983), it returned in a 60-minute season opener in which Edith had passed away a month earlier. With the help of his niece Stephanie (Danielle Brisebois), bottled-up Archie must deal with the death of his wife — another sitcom first. “It’s fitting for the program that forced episodic TV to mature to show us once again how fine it can be,” said Alan L. Gansberg in THRwho confessed to some sniffling himself.

By then, showrunner-author Lear had parlayed the All in the Family base camp into a virtual multiverse of spin-offs (Maude, The Jeffersons) and spawns (Sanford and Son). He was hailed for “reshaping the face of TV programming” with “a new era of adult-oriented fare.” By THR‘s reckoning, he had created and produced 16 series “amassing a total of 1400 episodes, or 700 hours of programs.”

For his part, Reiner was not gone from prime time for a long time. In June 24, 1978, on ABC, he produced, co-wrote (with Phil Mishkin), and starred in Free Countrya whimsical dramedy in which Reiner played an 89-year-old Lithuanian immigrant looking back on his fresh-off-the-boat self, also played by Reiner. It didn’t last the summer.

Yet Free Country deserves a footnote in the Rob Reiner filmography as the start of the multi-hyphenate artistry — he added feature length film director with This Is Spinal Tap in 1984 — that seemed to have been passed down from his father along with the receding hairline. “I was always trying to overcome his name,” Reiner told a reporter in 1969, concerned that his father’s legacy would overshadow his own. He needn’t have worried.