Let’s be honest, hair loss sucks. Rob Reiner can relate. During the first season of All in the Family, he started losing hair—and fast. Writers and producers didn’t love the idea of Michael Stivic having a receding hairline, so they bought him a hairpiece. Most viewers didn’t even notice it!
Rob Reiner Had a Receding Hairline
Of course, the real-life Reiner is not worried at all about his hairline and it hasn’t affected his ability to get jobs. Perhaps, the creators of the show were just a little too hung up about hairlines. Buts it’s difficult to say how different audiences would have reacted if Michael Stivic didn’t have as much hair.
The following feature is adapted from LIFE’s special edition All in the Family: TV’s Groundbreaking Comedy, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary.
Audiences watching TV on Tuesday, Jan. 12, 1971, probably wondered about the unusual disclaimer running ahead of All in the Family, letting them know that the new CBS program planned to throw “a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns.” The show then opens with Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton, as their characters Archie and Edith Bunker, sitting side-by-side at a doily-draped spinet and singing the show’s theme song, “Those Were the Days”:
Boy, the way Glenn Miller played.
Songs that made the Hit Parade.
Guys like us, we had it made.
Those were the days.
The song brought to mind the comforting prewar music of the big bands. 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.
