Unexpected attention also came their way.
Probably not, with all them left-wingers runnin’ the whole of TV.” While John Wayne wasn’t up for an award, those “pinkos” working in TV bestowed three statuettes on All in the Family, one to Stapleton as best actress in a comedy series, and two to Lear, one for outstanding new series and another for outstanding comedy series. That May, the show’s four leads introduced the Emmy Awards in a skit that depicted them watching the award ceremony from their Hauser Street living room, with Archie asking, “I wonder if Duke Wayne is up for anything. People couldn’t help but cringe and take notice.
With All in the Family, the discord on the nation’s streets had finally leaped from the nightly news to the nightly entertainment. And that July, Joe, a film about an outraged welder (played by Peter Boyle) who abhors the counterculture, hates that a “colored” family moved into his Queens neighborhood, and heads to a commune to slaughter its inhabitants, opened to critical and box office success. The year before, a violent confrontation broke out in New York’s Wall Street area as construction workers chanting “All the Way, USA” clashed with antiwar demonstrators in what became known as the Hard Hat Riot. And George, the Jefferson patriarch, is as bullheadedly bigoted as Archie.Ĭharacters like Archie, pining for the past, might have been new to television, but he was not a stretch in 1971. Race proved to be an important issue throughout the series-one of the regular epithets Archie slings at Mike is “dumb Polack.” And just a few episodes into the first season, Archie is horrified to learn that a Black family has bought 708 Hauser Street, complaining that “the coons are coming.” Archie then realizes that Lionel’s parents, George and Louise, purchased the home. While Variety called it “the best TV comedy since The Honeymooners,” LIFE magazine’s John Leonard branded it “a wretched program.” The press also had mixed takes on their show. It wasn’t quite the tectonic reception creators Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin had hoped for. Few calls came, though, and only 15 percent of viewers welcomed the Bunkers into their living rooms.
Impatient, conservative, proudly bigoted, and malaprop-prone-he would say things like “Let him who is without sin be the rolling stone”-Archie was the furthest thing from the neighborly folks on Hee Haw, or for that matter, the paternal Jim Anderson on the 1950s show Father Knows Best, who sold insurance in his suburban paradise of Springfield.ĬBS so worried about viewers’ responses to Archie, that they manned their phone lines with additional operators to field the expected barrage of angry callers. Most people had never seen anything like Archie Bunker (at least on their televisions)-a bullet-headed loading-dock worker who swills beer, smokes cheap cigars, and has a chip on his shoulder as wide as the Queensboro Bridge. But as the four sit down to celebrate, it takes no time for Archie to complain about the “Hebes,” “spics,” “spades,” “pinkos,” and atheists who have co-opted society, all the while tarring Edith as a “silly dingbat” and spewing his bile at Mike by calling him a “meathead.” Gloria and Mike try to lighten the mood with an anniversary lunch they have prepared for the couple. When Archie and Edith return from church to their home at 704 Hauser Street in Queens, New York, Edith tells him how horrified she is that he has just cursed the minister for his sermon. But while the elegiac piece by the composer/lyricist team of Charles Strouse and Lee Adams elicited memories of better days, it also had a whiff of the caustic social satire of The Threepenny Opera (by the German writer/composer duo Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill), as Archie evoked the era of Herbert Hoover, whose conservative presidency ushered in the Great Depression. The song brought to mind the comforting prewar music of the big bands.