Why Is All in the Family on Abc When It Was a Cbs Show?
The Show That Changed Tv Forever
All in the Family was the starting time plan to genuinely reckon with the cultural upheaval of 1960s America. Telly would never be the aforementioned.
Adapted from Rock Me on the Water, HarperCollins Publishers, 2021.
When CBS first placed All in the Family unit on the air, on Jan 12, 1971, it irrevocably transformed goggle box. After a shaky first season in which it struggled to find an audience, the show prospered, ascension to get No. ane in the ratings for five consecutive years, a record unmatched at the fourth dimension. All in the Family commanded national attention to a degree almost impossible to imagine in today'due south fractionated entertainment mural. Archie Bunker'due south catchwords—stifle, meathead, and dingbat—all became national shorthand. Scholars earnestly debated whether the show punctured or promoted bigotry.
Its success not only helped lift The Mary Tyler Moore Show, 1000*A*Due south*H, and the other great topical comedies of the early 1970s, only also cemented the idea that goggle box could exist used to comment meaningfully on the society 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 equally diverse equally Fleabag, Atlanta, Breaking Bad, The Wire, and countless others. The night that CBS initially aired All in the Family unit was the first step on the road toward the Summit TV that we are living through today.
All in the Family condensed the "generation gap" of the 1960s into a single living room. It pitted Mike Stivic, a long-haired liberal, and his wife, the bubbly Gloria, against Gloria'southward father, Archie Bunker, a reactionary bigot and Richard Nixon–loving dockworker—equally Edith, the daffy but benevolent wife and female parent, looked on. Incarnated past a stellar bandage and energized by brilliant writing and directing, information technology became a goggle box landmark, widely lauded as one of the greatest and most influential shows ever.
Initially, though, it was something of a miracle that All in the Family unit reached the air at all. Before CBS bought information technology, ABC had rejected it twice. And before All in the Family, shows that tried to achieve more relevance had nearly all failed, mostly because they were likewise laden with practiced intentions to attract an audience. That All in the Family non simply reached the air only prospered was the upshot of two men: Norman Lear, its staunchly liberal creator, and Robert D. Wood, the conservative president of CBS, who put it on the schedule. That deed revolutionized goggle box, but both men were unlikely revolutionaries.
Norman Lear was the son of a man whose dreams dissolved quickly just whose resentments outlived him in the work of his son. Herman Lear was a small-scale-time salesman and entrepreneur, and a fountain of dubious get-rich-quick schemes. His wife, Jeanette, according to Norman, was cocky-absorbed, discontented, and, like her married man, volatile. Later, they would go Lear'due south early models for Archie and Edith Bunker. Throughout his babyhood in Connecticut and Brooklyn, Lear's parents immersed him in an surround of barely controlled anarchy. The two of them, Lear would often say, "lived at the ends of their nerves and the tops of their lungs." At the meridian of argument, the veins in his neck bulging, Lear'southward father would vanquish his fists confronting his breast and bellow at Lear's mother, "Jeanette, stifle yourself."
Like many children of the Great Depression, Lear found direction and structure in the military machine. After drifting 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. Later on a few years working as a Broadway press agent and, afterward, for his begetter, Lear made a decision that proved a turning betoken: He loaded his wife and infant daughter into a 1946 Oldsmobile convertible and pointed it toward Los Angeles. In that location, he hoped for a fresh outset, simply struggled to find work. He was reduced to selling furniture and baby photos door-to-door with a human being named Ed Simmons, an aspiring comedy author who was the husband of Lear'due south cousin.
Ane nighttime, Lear helped Simmons finish a parody of a popular song he had been writing. When they constitute a nightclub vocalist to buy the song, their payday was merely $40 betwixt them, just that was plenty to convince the ii to drop their salesman'southward satchels and plunge into a full-fourth dimension writing partnership. Soon subsequently, they caught the attention of industry insiders and began writing for an early idiot box-variety show.
Through the 1950s, Lear'south career advanced in step with the growth of tv set itself. These were the years of telly's so-called golden historic period, when earnest dramas such equally The Philco Tv Playhouse groomed a steady stream of immature directors for Hollywood. Lear marinated in the other neat television product of those years: the star-led variety shows, such as Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, that drew on traditions of vaudeville and radio comedy.
Lear thrived in this world. He began to ricochet between Los Angeles and New York, mastering the breakneck pace of television production—he survived the constant deadlines, he later on recalled, on Dexedrine to stay awake for all-night writing sessions and Seconal to slumber when they were over. He honed his sense of comedy, arresting the rhythms of sketches that had to quickly grip an audience's attention between singers and dancing acts.
His work was skilled and professional, and his shows were sufficiently successful to constantly open new doors for him. Eventually, he and Simmons ended their partnership, and Lear took upwardly with the director Bud Yorkin, with whom he created a production company that developed both tv 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 disquisitional excitement. No reviewers saw in the Lear and Yorkin movies, or their succession of television specials with soft-edged mainstream entertainers, the profile of anything new. Looking back, one Hollywood executive described them in those years as "yeoman producers, just guys that would get their heads down and do the work." Little of Lear's work in the 1960s signaled that he had much to say about the way America was transforming effectually him. "Here'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 intellectually expert than the things he was doing."
Within a few years, millions would agree, simply non until Lear met another Globe War II veteran who was an even more than unlikely candidate to transform the nature of telly.
The career of Robert D. Woods, the CBS executive who ultimately put All in the Family on the air, proceeded almost exactly in parallel with Lear'due south. 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. After the war, he graduated with a degree in advertising from the University of Southern California in 1949, the aforementioned yr Lear arrived in Los Angeles with his immature family.
Forest started his career in ad sales for the CBS radio affiliate in L.A., KNX. By 1960, he'd risen up the ranks to go vice president and manager of the network'southward local television chapter. His acme to that role anointed him equally a prince in the CBS empire. The chapter, KNXT, was one of the 5 Goggle box stations effectually the state 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 bully autonomy to O&O general managers like Wood and marked them every bit future leaders. The network besides pushed managers to deliver on-air editorials, like those in local newspapers, only left them almost entirely free to decide the content.
Wood thrived in this role. "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." Wood hired Howard Williams, an editorial writer from the conservative Los Angeles Mirror, to assist him develop the station'due south editorial line.
Forest was a gregarious boss, with a salesman's effortless capacity to brand friends and create camaraderie. He knew everybody's proper noun and had time to talk to anyone. "Didn't affair who they were … he was your buddy," Williams said. Forest'south politics were consistently conservative, reflecting the centre 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 first demonstrations by the free-speech communication movement erupted at UC Berkeley, Wood, in one of his on-air editorials, called the demonstrators "witless agitators" and insisted that they "be dealt with quickly and severely to set up an example for all fourth dimension to those who agitate for the sake of agitation."
A few years afterwards, CBS promoted Forest again, relocating him to the E Coast, where he took on a succession of top-level jobs. In early 1969, Forest was named president of the CBS Television Network, the visitor's highest-ranking television position.
This promotion placed him atop the nearly powerful and assisting of the three television set networks. CBS's preeminence was symbolized by its imposing Midtown Manhattan headquarters, an austere and dramatic spire of charcoal-gray granite known every bit Blackness Rock. From his 34th-floor office, Forest entered a Mad Men environment that appeared frozen in time. This was a more than urbane, cosmopolitan, and cutthroat world than the domesticated cycle of Junior League dinners and weekends at the beach that Wood had left backside in Los Angeles. Only he took to it naturally. To many effectually him, Wood came beyond as the West Coast equivalent of an Ivy Leaguer, confident and smooth, if no intellectual; he was e'er more comfortable discussing football than philosophy.
Only for all the ability and profitability that CBS projected through the belatedly '60s, it couldn't entirely ignore the social changes of the era. CBS faced disruption from the same demographic-driven transformation of its audition that had staggered the flick studios and sent weekly admissions in moving picture theaters plummeting through the '50s and '60s. Like Hollywood, the telly networks faced a growing disconnection betwixt their musty products and the young Babe Boomers whose swelling numbers and growing buying power were reshaping the market place for popular civilization. And Wood, with his grounding in Los Angeles, felt the tremors earlier than almost anyone else around him.
In 1961, Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, disparaged goggle box equally "a vast wasteland." Just he would take been just equally accurate to telephone call it "a vast cornfield."
Through the 1960s, the networks stubbornly looked away from the simultaneous earthquakes disrupting American life: the civil-rights and antiwar movements, the nightly carnage of Vietnam, the ascension 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 advertizing agencies was to produce what became known as "the least objectionable program" that could depict the most various viewership. In practice, this translated into shows that would be acceptable not only to urban sophisticates merely too to small-town traditionalists. So, off the CBS assembly line flowed a procession of banal comedies celebrating the simple wisdom of rural life, including The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Testify. Surrounding them were diverseness shows and comedies led by aging figures from the '50s and fifty-fifty earlier, such as Ed Sullivan and Lucille Ball. Each night, CBS chronicled the tumultuous strains violent at America on Walter Cronkite'south newscast and so spent the next three and a half hours of prime number time trying to erase them from viewers' minds.
CBS'due south showtime attempt to reflect the irresolute culture came in 1967, when information technology premiered The Smothers Brothers One-act Hour. The Smothers Brothers, Tom the leader and Dick the direct human, were a modestly successful duo who had built an audience through albums and a nightclub act that combined stand up-upward comedy with gentle parodies of folk music. Their show was a hitting from the commencement and quickly became the 1 spot on tv that seemed conscious of the burgeoning youth civilization. Cut-border bands such as Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, The Who, and Simon and Garfunkel all appeared.
As the show'southward audience grew, Tom Smothers in particular became adamant to use the platform to deliver a distinctly liberal message almost contemporary issues, especially the Vietnam War. Tom said, "There's no point of being on television … at this betoken in time, with what's going on in this country, and not reflect what's going on," recalled Rob Reiner, the hereafter All in the Family unit star, who joined the bear witness for part of its final season equally a writer. CBS censors predictably recoiled, snipping lines from some segments and rejecting others completely. The show had supporters within CBS, but the network's senior leadership grew weary of the constant arguments. Forest canceled the show in early April 1969, less than 2 months afterwards he'd causeless the network'due south presidency.
The cancellation underscored the difficulty of changing CBS. But pressure for a new arroyo was edifice, and it came, surprisingly, from the network's business concern staff. CBS had the biggest audiences, simply ABC and NBC were successfully wooing advertisers with their arguments that they had meliorate audiences: young, affluent consumers in urban centers. "Information technology was the sales section that said if we want to be competitive, we ought to try to get a younger profile with our audience," said Gene Jankowski, a CBS advertising executive who afterwards became the network's 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 promise to leave his marking on the culture. He didn't talk well-nigh the network as a public trust; he saw information technology, unsentimentally, by and large every bit a vehicle to sell soap and cars. Michael Ovitz, then a young agent, recalled that no ane in the creative community looked to Forest for insight. "He never read a script," Ovitz said. "And if he did, no one cared what he had to say virtually information technology." Neither did Forest feel whatever urge to provide a platform for the new voices and social movements agitating for change: Even after he moved to more than liberal New York City, his politics remained anchored well right of heart. Irwin Segelstein, a top CBS programming executive, later said of Wood, "Bob is really Archie Bunker. The radical-right Irish conservative."
But the advertising department establish Wood receptive to its arguments for a new management. One twenty-four hour period in Feb 1970, Wood came to the sales department and said that CBS had to go younger in its programming and its audience. Privately, he told CBS executives that he feared losing the younger generation to the edgy new movies emerging from Hollywood, like Easy Passenger. "A certain genre of films were pulling young people away," Wood said later. "I sensed a shift in the national mood." Wood knew he needed a program that would brand a loud statement in order to attract new viewers. He "wanted to get some testify that would cause some conversation," recalled Perry Lafferty, the former director and producer serving as CBS's vice president for programming in Hollywood. Norman Lear, during the first 2 decades of his prove-business organisation career, had displayed neither much interest nor much facility in generating conversation, just Lear would provide Wood exactly what he was looking for, and then some.
All in the Family began as a British boob tube show titled Till Expiry Usa Do Role, the story of a working-course bigot, his abrupt-tongued wife, their daughter, and her husband. Information technology caused a awareness in U.k. for its frank treatment of racism and other previously taboo topics, and its potential as a template for an American prove seemed obvious. But when CBS tried to acquire the American rights to Till Death, information technology discovered that they had already been sold to Norman Lear.
The fabric had instantly detonated with Lear: The battles betwixt the bigoted begetter and the liberal son-in-constabulary reminded him of his own struggles with his male parent, Herman. In late summer 1968, he caused the rights to the projection and secured a contract from ABC to develop a pilot.
Lear did non begin adapting Till Death with any ambition to transform television. "I have never, always remembered thinking, Oh, we're doing something outlandish, riotously dissimilar," he recalled. "I wasn't on any mission. And I don't think I knew I was breaking such basis. I didn't scout Petticoat Junction, for Chrissake. I didn't picket Beverly Hillbillies. I didn't know what I was doing." To the extent that he had an ulterior motive, it 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, cast, and film a 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 player in dozens of movies and television shows through the '60s, and Stapleton had worked on Broadway and in telly. Lear cast 2 lesser-known younger actors as Mike and Gloria, and shot a pilot in tardily September 1968. ABC, however, rejected it—equally well as a second, redo pilot he shot a year later.
Lear's agent pushed the concept to CBS. Wood was initially hesitant, but shortly recognized that he had plant his chat starter. He later explained his thinking to the sociologist Todd Gitlin: "I really thought the pilot was very, very funny … It certain seemed to me a terrific fashion to test this whole attitude about the network." Simply a twelvemonth afterward Wood buried the Smothers Brothers, he gave new life to Archie Bunker.
Fifty-fifty with Forest'southward support, the show faced formidable headwinds inside CBS. William Paley, the autocratic chairman of the board, hated information technology from the outset, because it vulgar. Simply Woods was determined. "Bob Forest had balls," said James Rosenfield, an ad salesman at the time who went on to become the president of CBS. "He really had balls, and what I never understood to this day was how that happened, because Bob Wood came out of sales. He didn't have any clout with the Hollywood community. He didn't know Norman Lear, merely he understood that there was an opportunity hither for significant alter in the medium, and he made it happen."
With the get-alee from CBS, Lear reshaped the cast with new choices for the younger roles. For Gloria, the Bunkers' girl, he chose Sally Struthers, a young blonde whom Lear had seen on the Smothers Brothers and in the picture V Like shooting fish in a barrel Pieces. For Mike, the son-in-police force, Lear looked closer to home, casting Rob Reiner, the son of his longtime friend Carl Reiner. In addition to his writing for the Smothers Brothers, the younger Reiner, with long hair and unabashedly liberal views, had get the go-to casting option for the industry's stilted first attempts to acknowledge the irresolute youth civilization, on individual episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies and Gomer Pyle. "I was similar the resident Hollywood hippie," Reiner said later.
For the director, Lear chose John Rich, a skilled television veteran whom he had met 2 decades earlier. Coincidentally, Rich had been approached at almost exactly the same time to directly The Mary Tyler Moore Bear witness, which preceded All in the Family on the air at CBS by 4 months. While Mary was pathbreaking in its own, quieter mode—illustrating the changing roles of women in American society through deft and affectionate character studies—to Rich the bear witness didn't appear nearly equally revolutionary as Lear'southward project. "It was 1970, and the dialogue that was written and so just blew me abroad," Rich remembered. "And I called Norman … I said, 'You aren't going to make this, are you?' He said, 'Yep.' I said, 'Is anybody going to put it on?' He said, 'They say they will.'"
Rich'due south uncertainty, even incredulity, was widely shared. Even with CBS's approval, the show's time to come e'er seemed tenuous to the cast and crew as they worked toward their January 1971 premiere. "We knew nosotros were doing something good, merely we didn't think anybody was going to go for this," Reiner remembered. O'Connor was so skeptical that the evidence 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 get-go-form ticket back if the show was canceled.
Lear, too, felt that CBS'south delivery was only conditional. Yeah, Woods had bought the prove, but he remained skittish about it. "He wanted to hazard, only he fought me molar and blast," Lear remembered. Wood and CBS were but uncertain that a show this unlike from their usual programming would find an audience. "That's all they worried about," Lear said. "It's as simple as 'We don't know if this works.' We know the Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction—we know that works. Nosotros don't know if this works." During the filming of an early on episode, Rich was in the command room when Wood stopped by the fix. "I hope you lot know what yous're doing," he told the manager, "because my rump is on the line here." But weeks before the evidence was scheduled to air, CBS still had failed to sell whatsoever advertising to air with it.
From the start, Lear participated in an unrelenting button and pull with the CBS censors over the testify'southward language and content. The network's caution was evident in the fourth dimension slot it selected for the bear witness: Tuesday, a nighttime information technology didn't view equally pivotal, at nine:30 p.1000., between Hee Haw and the CBS News 60 minutes. In advance of the premiere, Forest sent a telegram to CBS affiliates quoting a spoken language he'd delivered the previous jump: "Nosotros have to augment our base of operations," he wrote. "We have to concenter new viewers. Nosotros're going to operate on the theory that it is better to try something new than not to endeavour it and wonder what would take happened if we had."
CBS fifty-fifty developed an unusual disclaimer to appear just before the show's first 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 fashion—only how cool they are." To the cast, the disclaimer "was ridiculous, considering they're putting the testify on the air, and yet they're trying to altitude themselves from the show at the aforementioned time," Reiner remembered.
CBS'south ambiguity crystallized into a single choice: which episode to air beginning. Lear wanted to commencement with the third version of the pilot, which he had taped with the new cast. Viewed even decades later on, the episode is explosive. Summoning painful memories, viscerally connected to his characters, Lear, then in his mid-40s, found in his script a passionate and urgent voice he had never earlier tapped. Within minutes, Archie is raging against "your spics and your spades"; complaining about "Hebes" and "Black beauties"; calling Edith a "giddy dingbat" and telling her to "stifle" herself; and describing Mike every bit a "dumb Polack" and "the laziest white man I've ever seen"—the latter a reprise of an insult that Herman Lear used to direct at his son. Mike, simply as heatedly, is blaming offense on poverty and insisting that he and Gloria see no evidence that God exists. In the opening scene, Archie and Edith arrive home early on from church and catch Mike kissing Gloria amorously equally 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 "Sun morning" line—which clearly suggested that the young couple was on their way to have sex activity (during daylight, no less). The network insisted that Lear take it out; he refused. Wood offered a compromise: The line could stay in if Lear agreed to push the airplane pilot episode back to the second week and run the projected second prove offset. Lear refused again. He believed the pilot episode presented "Archie in full," with all his prejudices and animosities on open display. Airing information technology was like jumping into the deep end of a pool; CBS and Lear together would "go fully wet the showtime time out," as Lear later described it. In what would become a common occurrence, Lear told Wood he would quit if CBS started with the second episode.
On January 12, 1971, the date that All in the Family was scheduled to announced for the first time, Rich and the crew were performing a dress rehearsal for the season'south 6th episode in the CBS complex known every bit Television City, at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. Merely before 6:30 California time, they crowded into Rich'south small control room, where they could sentry a network feed as the show's 9:thirty eastern airtime approached. They might have caught the terminal minutes of Hee Haw, a last vestige of idiot box's obsession with rural audiences, before the command room filled with the disembodied vocalisation reading CBS's strange disclaimer. Then came the sounds of Jean Stapleton at the pianoforte equally she and Carroll O'Connor sang the show's nostalgic theme song, "Those Were the Days." Still, information technology wasn't clear yet which episode CBS had placed on the air. Within moments came the paradigm of Mike pursuing Gloria in the kitchen and her parents arriving home early from church, the initial scenes of the airplane pilot. The CBS eye had blinked. Telly's search for a new audition had finally torn downward the pall separating information technology from the tumultuous changes unfolding effectually 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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