“All In the Family” took social issues to new level on TV
by Carder
Lear’s genius was to get All in the Family on the air, and then to introduce previously taboo topics to American television. As Lear pointed out, prior to All in the Family, the common idea of a sitcom was pastoral and agricultural, such as Petticoat Junction. He went on to point out that in the earlier world of sitcoms, a plot might be that the boss is coming to dinner and the roast is burned.
Introducing topics such as racism, abortion, and menopause took American television to a whole different level.
~ Bob Gelfand describing the influence of television producer Norman Lear in shaping the television culture of America via the hit series All in the Family, City Watch, March 17
Mar.18, 2015 6:00 am |
Pop Culture |
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
I remember when the show first started. While bringing bigotry to the forefront, it did so by making fun of it and displaying its narrowmindedness, actually making it very funny. I think Norman Lear did a masterful job. He had to walk a fine line. Archie wasn’t a bigot, he disliked everyone! The thing is he wasn’t hateful, in his ignorance he just displayed all the stereotypes and their absurdities. Blacks, Jews, Poles, Catholics, were all viewed in the same light by Archie.
The abortion episode came years later and Gloria did not have an abortion. It was just discussed. If I recall correctly Edith was very saddened by the suggestion of aborting the baby.
If anyone does a reboot of All in the Family, Archie will not be permitted to smoke a cigar. Some things are just too graphic and obscene for television, even in this liberal age.
My parents laughed so hard the first time the Bunker toilet flushed!! I still laugh when I remember “a sock and a sock, or a shoe and a sock.”
Norman Lear also produced “Mary Hartman Mary Hartman” and continued to spoof taboo subjects at the time (mid to late ’70’s).
I don’t recall any episodes dealing directly with abortion, however. It was sort of a funny show but probably would have done better if it had been on at prime time and wasn’t in soap opera format. (No canned laughter etc.)
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It was an episode of the spin-off “Maude” that i remember dealing with abortion. Maude was Edith Bunker’s cousin, and she and Archie couldn’t stand each other (LOL).
Maude’s (feminist) daughter, Carol “convinced” her to have an abortion.
I remember, even as a young girl, that I was very ANGRY at that particular episode. I had LIKED the show up until then.
Hi Pamela.
Didn’t Maude’s “feminist” daughter also have an affair with a married man? Apparently being a married man’s plaything didn’t violate her feminist convictions.
Anyway, I remember that episode very well. It was very controversial and “progressive” for the time. I recall the daughter really pressured Maude about having an abortion.
I’m not old enough to have seen Maude when it first came out, but I have seen it on Youtube. I must say I was actually very surprised about the extent to which her daughter pressured her, given how much better it would have been for the cause if it had more clearly been her own decision. I suppose that the direction they went added more conflict to the story, which is the only explanation I could think of.
All of this was just Marxists surreptitiously advancing negative views of the “cultural hegemony,” the shared values and cultural power held by the prevailing institutions of the dominant culture, in order to weaken it. Through culture, the oppressive capitalist system has us all, rich and poor, hood-winked into believing it is a good thing.
Once these culture-sustaining powers have been weakened, we will all realize how we have been brainwashed to support the prevailing economic power structure, and we will revolt. The workers, not capitalists, will take over the means of production, and we will no longer be oppressed for their purposes. The Marxists are waiting with the answer: communism.
The main unholy trinity for the Marxists are: Judeo-Christianity, free commerce, and the nukelar family.
All in the Family was an opening salvo against the nukelar family: the wife is oppressed, the young adults are wiser, etc.
Wikipedia has all of the episodes, with a brief note about the topic of each.
There were two episodes in which “Gloria” had a pregnancy scare.
In the first, there is conflict since she instinctively wants the baby, but “Michael” believes they should abort. His rant includes the over-population myth that was quite the vogue then, largely popularized in popular culture with Ehrlich’s 1968 “Population Bomb.” [NB: None of Ehrlich’s predictions of environmental collapse, supposedly imminent by the 1980s, have yet come true.] [NB: Ehrlich was buddies and co-author with John Holdren, Obama’s first Science Czar; Ehrlich/Hansen offered population control ideas such as birth control in the water supply, etc. Now you know the kind of elitist intellectuals you are dealing with.]
In the end, I believe Gloria’s first pregnancy was a miscarriage, solving the conflict for the time-being.
In the second pregnancy scare, they decided to have the baby. I think their child was yet another character at the end of the run of this series.
The show was very funny, and I recall watching original broadcasts, as well as re-runs. As a young person in the 197os, this helped shape my views of right and wrong, and helped me realize that if I held progressive views, I would be more virtuous than the average person.
Since those old, “those-were-the-days” days, we have been softened up little by little to accept as “normal” a range of things that wold have been morally wrong in the 1950s. That is “progress.” Their plan is working.