Why Archie Bunker still matters

To the ongoing celebrations of Norman Lear’s life and achievements, I would like to add a modest tribute of my own. It is Mr. Lear, who died Tuesday at 101, to whom I owe my initial education in the mysteries and mechanics of procreation. It happened when I was 9 years old.

One Friday evening, my younger brothers and I waited for my father, late again to pick us up for our regular, court-mandated every-other-weekend visit. As usual, we whiled away the time watching whatever happened to be on our pre-cable, 12-channel TV — in this case a rerun of Lear’s most famous show, “All in the Family.”

Norman Lear realized television’s potential for social commentary with the help of actors and writers nimble enough to pivot from comedy to drama and back again.

What we saw, which I can now report was a scene from the late season seven episode “Gloria’s False Alarm,” filled us with incredulous mirth: a man with a droopy mustache and his hysterical blonde wife in urgent discussion over whether or not he should have his penis removed.

At least, that’s what we concluded a “vasectomy” was, judging by the gravity with which they approached this apparently life-altering, irreversible procedure. We continued to ponder this during the 90-minute drive to our father’s house until he finally asked us what all our furtive, backseat sniggering was about. Our stunningly misinformed answer must have suggested to him that he had been derelict in yet another paternal duty. He spent the rest of the ride gently but efficiently filling us in on everything we needed to know about sex.

That evening’s edifying discourse was no doubt only one of many frank conversations enabled by “All in the Family” and the new era of television it ushered in. Certainly, our other syndicated favorites like “The Brady Bunch,” “Leave It to Beaver,” or “Gilligan’s Island” offered nothing so thought-provoking.

All of the hot buttons

We take it for granted now, but television’s long journey to respectability began with the creative and commercial risks Lear took with his very first show as producer.

In 1971, it was far from obvious that the blustering, blue-collar bigot named Archie Bunker would last a few weeks, let alone endure as one of the medium’s most iconic characters. ABC had passed on “All in the Family” twice, and when CBS finally aired the pilot, the network prefaced it with a timid disclaimer: “Warning: the show that you are about to see is ‘All in the Family.’ It 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 — just how absurd they are.”

The audience was ready for something more daring, even if executives weren’t. The show became a hit, in part because of its willingness to violate unspoken taboos. The fifth episode featured the first gay character on a sitcom, and the sixth centered on Archie’s daughter Gloria’s miscarriage. Subsequent installments would address rape, the Vietnam War, menopause, and a sort of proto trans-bashing.

The “All in the Family” spin-offs Lear developed gave him even more latitude to address hot-button topics ranging from abortion and alcoholism (“Maude”) to busing and gang violence (“Good Times”). Even the more conventionally lighthearted “The Jeffersons” broke new ground by featuring an affluent black family (an idea Lear claimed was suggested by members of the Black Panthers who once visited him on set). Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons would later say George Jefferson was the first black man he ever saw write a check.

Lear realized television’s potential for social commentary with the help of actors and writers nimble enough to pivot from comedy to drama and back again. His many imitators weren’t always up to the task. Thus the rise in the 1980s of the dependably ham-fisted “very special episode,” which by turns ambushed unsuspecting young viewers with the confusing spectacle of Gary Coleman and friend “playing Tarzan” with the leering neighborhood bike shop owner (“Diff’rent Strokes”) and forever linked a certain Pointer Sisters hit with Elizabeth Berkley’s enthusiastic if unconvincing portrayal of caffeine pill-induced psychosis (“Saved by the Bell”).

A complicated entertainment legacy

It’s indisputable that Lear changed television. Those of us who prefer our laughs straight up might say it was for the worse. But if you blame Lear for the sitcom’s fall from the heights of the disciplined professionalism of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “I Love Lucy,” then you must also award him partial credit for one of the form’s universally acknowledged triumphs: “Seinfeld” was arguably a reaction to all of the earnest treacle that preceded it. And aren’t Lear’s unabashedly flawed characters the ancestors of prestige TV’s beloved antiheroes?

Without Archie Bunker, would we ever have Tony Soprano?

This connection makes sense, but it also reveals a certain hollowness at Archie Bunker’s core. Compared to Tony, an Italian-American Catholic from New Jersey deeply and painfully rooted in his family and community, Archie is a blank. He speaks of his father once (he was mentally and physically abusive). In the pilot, we learn he got his union dockworker job through his uncle. He has anywhere from one to three brothers, depending on the episode.

While he belittles white ethnics like his “Polack” son-in-law Michael just as eagerly as he does Jews and blacks, he seems to have no heritage of his own. Is he English? The surname “Bunker” would make this a decent guess, if Archie weren’t on record dismissing England as a “fag country.” Perhaps his lineage goes back to some distant Bünker from Germany. But wouldn’t that make him what he terms “a Kraut”?

Archie’s a Christian, but there is something off about that identity as well: a working stiff from outer-borough New York is an Episcopalian? It’s true that the Episcopal Church’s well-known 1960s liberal turn gives Archie yet another target — when we first meet him, he’s arguing with his wife, Edith, about the bleeding-heart sermon he just interrupted at the Sunday service. But I suspect assigning him to such a notoriously mild and “respectable” denomination serves the same purpose as obscuring his origins.

For Archie to hate and fear as many types of people as possible, he needs to be an utterly generic WASP (minus the economic and social privilege), with just enough religion to fly into a rage when his daughter and son-in-law hint at their atheism but not enough to challenge his allegiance to anything more specific than “American values.”

Archie Bunker in the 'Age of Trump'

Archie’s all-encompassing resentment made him an ideal foil for enlightened progressives, both in the show and in the audience. If Lear made no apologies for how wealthy his work made him, neither was he one to dismiss what he did as mere entertainment. He embraced his role as a progressive gadfly until the end of his life.

In response to the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan and the simultaneous ascent of the Christian right, Lear founded the left-wing advocacy group “People for the American Way.” The organization’s “achievements” over its 42-year history include helping tank Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination, trying to tank Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, deplatforming Alex Jones, and thwarting the HGTV career of filmmakers and real estate entrepreneurs Jason and David Benham.

Lear originally wrote Archie to be hated. It’s a testament to the talent and skill that he and his collaborators brought to “All of the Family” that the character broke free of his creators.

Like many on the left, Lear found renewed purpose in Donald Trump’s unthinkable 2016 election victory. Lear’s selection for the 2017 Kennedy Honors, which traditionally include a reception at the White House, allowed him to combine a victory lap with a public Orange Man snub. When a live production of an old “All in the Family” episode (with Woody Harrelson as the paterfamilias) earned Lear an Emmy nomination on the day after his 98th birthday, he took it as one more opportunity to express his disdain for the now struggling commander in chief.

Amidst the thanks, Lear and his producing partner, Brent Miller, couldn’t resist noting that his late-career triumph “aired the night of Trump’s impeachment,” while hastening to add: “With 98 days left until the election, and the day after one of us turned 98, it all seems so poetic.”

This launched something of a birthday tradition for Lear. He marked turning 99 by reflecting on voting rights in the “Age of Trump” in the Washington Post.” For his centennial, he went with the New York Times: Archie Bunker “probably would have been a Trump voter,” Lear wrote of his most famous creation, “but I think that the sight of the American flag being used to attack Capitol Police would have sickened him.” We will never know.

Nostalgic revivals aside, it’s hard to imagine the likes of Archie Bunker getting a sympathetic ear in today’s polarized media landscape. Watching old YouTube clips of the character, it’s easy to forget his original purpose as leftist propaganda. The shocking ease with which Archie utters unsayable words and exposes his deepest, most incriminatingly human thoughts is hilarious, yes, but it also evokes a distant past when we could all be a little more honest with each other. Lear originally wrote Archie to be hated. It’s a testament to the talent and skill that he and his collaborators brought to “All of the Family” that the character broke free of his creators.

In the tightly policed monoculture of 20th-century America, this wasn’t a problem. Today, however, there’s no telling what damage an unrehabilitated reactionary like Archie could do, especially if we notice the occasional wisdom amidst the crass language and crude slurs.

The Bunker abode is modest and small enough that the sound of a toilet flushing (another TV first for Lear) reverberates throughout the house. Archie’s fierce attachment to his beloved armchair reveals him as a man who doesn’t share space lightly. And yet he and Edith have opened their home to their feckless Boomer daughter and her smug husband. “I just want to learn a little bit about society so I can help people,” the son-in-law protests in the first episode when Archie dares suggest that taking college classes isn’t the best use of his father-in-law’s largess.

More than 50 years later, Archie’s response to Meathead’s vague do-gooder ambitions echoes what Americans feel about the humanitarian justifications offered for unchecked immigration and endless foreign wars: “People? Your mother-in-law and me is people. Help us, will you?”

If you squint, this indecorous but welcome appeal to common sense might just remind you of another brash loudmouth from Queens.