All In The Family: The Complete 3rd Season (DVD)
APPROX. 610 MINS. - PROD. YEAR: 1973 - MPA RATING: NR
" it’s still milestone television, with some of the episodes remaining very funny, even 30 years later
Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.
Not too many years ago I visited the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. and was amazed at the contents of "America´s attic." Look here, and you see the original Star-Spangled Banner. Look there, and behold, the actual tent that George Washington used at Valley Forge, or a taxidermy mount of a famous Confederate general´s horse. Amid all the historical relics are a few pop-cultural ones, including Fonzie´s leather jacket from "Happy Days," and Archie Bunker´s chair from "All in the Family." Archie´s chair? Heyyyyy!
Who would have thought that a Norman Lear version of a British comedy, "Till Death Us Do Part," a show introduced to the American public with a warning label that the contents were offensive, would have such an impact as to be commemorated now in the national museum?
I remember that debut show vividly, the way people remember what they were doing when Kennedy was shot or the Challenger exploded. I was in college, and we turned to each other when that warning label popped up and waited in anticipation for something truly mind-blowing to happen. It was, after all, still considered the Sixties, that period between Kennedy´s assassination and Nixon´s resignation. Then, the first visual image appeared on-screen. It was an older, middle-aged, middle-class man sitting at the piano with his wife. Huh? "Boy the way Glenn Miller played," Archie Bunker sang. "Songs that made the HIT pa-RADE," Edith warbled—make that shrieked. "Guys like us we had it made, those were the days," they both continued. "And you knew what you WERE then!" Edith sang, like a commuter train screeching on a sharp turn. "Goils were goils and men were men," Archie added. "Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again," both sang. "Didn´t need no welfare state. Everybody pulls his weight. Gee our old La Salle ran great. Those were the days!"
We looked at each other again. Yes, the singing was truly offensive, but hardly deserving of a warning label. Then the players came onstage in the tiny interior of a modest home at 704 Houser Street in Queens, New York, and Archie Bunker started talking. That´s when we, and all of America, leaned forward and said, or at least thought, "WHOA! Can he say that on television?" Archie, the quintessential W.A.S.P. (the era´s term for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), kept ranting about Hebes and Polacks and Spics and Spades—so much so that you have to wonder, years later, if he didn´t single-handedly spur a political correctness countermovement.
When the show debuted on CBS that January 12, 1971, America was just as divided as it is now, embroiled in debates over a war (Vietnam, not Iraq) and social programs (Civil Rights and Women´s Rights, not Gay and Lesbian Rights). Conservatives like Archie Bunker railed against welfare, Head Start, Affirmative Action, women´s lib, anti-war protesters, hippies, and "foreigners"—anyone who didn´t fit the profile of white America. Archie Bunker became a lightning rod for sensitive issues, a way of waving them in the face of the public like the flag and saying the unspeakable. These were things people were uncomfortable talking about at the water cooler or outside classrooms, but "All in the Family" found a home with Americans because it played to both sides. Archconservatives found a kindred spirit in Archie and cheered him for saying what they could only think, while liberals pointed to the load of "bunk" that Bunker delivered in his monologic rants. He was the poster child for what was wrong with America, and he was the poster child for the average American. For five years—the first years of the show when "All in the Family" topped the Nielsen´s—it was a marriage made in TV heaven.
Like "The Honeymooners," it was a minimalist set, with mostly the combined living room and dining room of the Bunkers shown, and occasionally the kitchen and front "stoop" (porch). Now and then viewers would see the bar where Bunker escaped, or a bureaucratic office he had to go to, but we rarely saw him on the loading dock where he made his blue-collar living. Most of his co-workers and neighbors came to the house when they made their appearances. But inside that minimalist set, fireworks went off on a weekly basis. In retrospect, if "Seinfeld" was a show about nothing, "All in the Family" was a show about everything. And shouting. Every show was built around a central issue up for debate, and Archie (Carroll O´Connor) would rant while his daughter, Gloria (Sally Struthers) and live-in son-in-law, Mike Stivic (Rob Reiner) would rail against the establishment. Meek Edith (Jean Stapleton), meanwhile, could see both sides and tried to keep the peace. Mike, a jobless college student, in addition to being Polish, was Archie´s in-house target, but also his nemesis, because if Archie was the quintessential archconservative, Mike was the kind of liberal that Rush Limbaugh would attack years later. And there was a lot of name-calling.
Though it was a midseason replacement with a shortened first run, "All in the Family" won an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series its first season, and also won for the second and third seasons. The third season saw the Lear bunch pioneering serious topics within a comedy format, offering shows about Archie getting mugged and Gloria victimized by an attempted sexual assault. Here are the season´s 24 episodes:
