Archie, get the fuck out of my living room!
All in the Family premiered on TV 50 years ago.
It was launched by liberal producer Norman Lear starring liberal actor Carroll O'Connor as the “loveable” right wing racist.
The USA TV viewers apparently liked to hang around with Archie. They would invite him into their living rooms week after week and let him shout of his racist, right wing garbage. His show was top rated for the first 4 years.
The intention of Lear and company was to ridicule the right winger, the program intended as a satire, a send up of beliefs and values that the producers did not share, and presumable, that none of their friends shared.
‘As Lear recalled later that year to Variety, “There was no advance publicity, no promo, as a nervous network didn’t quite know what to do with a show in which the hero is a bigot. The web expected an avalanche of protests and hired extra operators to handle them. There was an avalanche, but 99% of the callers liked the show.”’
So the network was nervous about a bigot hero but once it sold and was a hit everyone was happy.
You can’t center a show around a bigot and sell me on the idea that you are doing something good for the culture. Presenting Archie every week normalized his type and just part of the family “All in the Family” and therefore welcome. The whole idea was backward and Lear would have known it would backfire and I’m suggesting it did.
If Archie Bunker was part of my family I wouldn’t be welcoming him into my living room week after week for 12 years. If he did have to come around I would tell him to “shut the fuck up and watch the football game or get out, I don’t want to hear your shit.” Yet Norman Lear, and CBS dumped his shit into millions of homes week after week.
What was the result of this? Was it an incredible swing to the left and the marginalization of bigotry? The original run of All in the Family went from 1971 until 1979 and guess what? Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 sending the nation into a dive into right wing power. Ronny was lovable too as he was telling us how the government was our enemy while taking power away from union workers and giving it to the corporations.
Reagan was a slicker Archie Bunker character elevated to the presidency.
But these things cannot possibly be connected can they? After all everyone knows that TV is just harmless entertainment and has no impact on real life. That is probably why corporations dumped billions of advertising dollars into it. But maybe they studied the effects of TV and advertising and its power to persuade.
On the heels of Archie and Reagan’s destruction of the Fairness Doctrine which regulated that broadcasters had to present both sides of an argument came Fox News in 1996.
Then in 2004 NBC launched The Apprentice, a phony reality competition program with Donald Trump as the great wise billionaire genius.
This ran for 15 years. Trump’s TV run was even longer than Archie’s.
In 2016 Trump was elected president. And millions of TV Fox News viewers still think he’s a genius who won by a landslide even though he lost a close race for reelection.
Yeah, bring Archie’s Ronnie’s and Donny’s right wing hate and corporate wealth loving mindset into our living rooms. It has no effect at all.
