75 Best Archie Bunker Quotes from ‘All In the Family’
The best Archie Bunker quotes are courtesy of creator Norman Lear. As a progressive, Lear himself was the opposite of Bunker’s “lovable bigot” character, but still imbued the All In the Family patriarch with humanity.
Lear, who died at 101 on Dec. 4, 2023, designed the All In the Family patriarch to bring social commentary into sitcoms, something that hadn’t been done extensively before he revolutionized the genre.
All in the Family in 1971,” he wrote in a 2022 op-ed for The New York Times to mark his turning into a centenarian. “The kinds of topics Archie Bunker and his family argued about — issues that were dividing Americans from one another, such as racism, feminism, homosexuality, the Vietnam War and Watergate — were certainly being talked about in homes and families. They just weren’t being acknowledged on television.”
Behold, the best All In the Family quotes from Archie Bunker—but be warned that they’re probably not the sort of language you’d hear on primetime broadcast TV today, and his opinions certainly don’t reflect ours!
“Encouraging that kind of conversation was a goal of mine when we began broadcasting All in the Family in 1971,” he wrote in a 2022 op-ed for The New York Times to mark his turning into a centenarian. “The kinds of topics Archie Bunker and his family argued about — issues that were dividing Americans from one another, such as racism, feminism, homosexuality, the Vietnam War and Watergate — were certainly being talked about in homes and families. They just weren’t being acknowledged on television.”
Behold, the best All In the Family quotes from Archie Bunker—but be warned that they’re probably not the sort of language you’d hear on primetime broadcast TV today, and his opinions certainly don’t reflect ours!
Michael/Mike “Meathead” Stivic (Rob Reiner) called for a very particular type of performance. Archie and Edith Bunker’s son-in-law on “All in the Family” was the progressive foil to the Bunkers’ bigoted paterfamilias, a member of the Baby Boomer counterculture (back when that was a thing) who rallied against the conservative Greatest Generation beliefs championed by Archie. But at the same time, Mike was one of those well-educated liberal white guys who still struggled to recognize his own ingrained prejudices — particularly when it came to the women in his life — and was often guilty of being more concerned with feeling morally superior than figuring out how to actually bring about the social change he professed to want.
Read More: https://www.slashfilm.com/1550357/all-in-the-family-rob-reiner-audition-initially-rejected/
Reiner would eventually prove himself capable of handling this knot of contradictions, but it took him a couple of tries, much like “All in the Family” itself. As he once recalled in an interview with the Archive of American Television, Reiner had been hired to write for “Headmaster” not long after his original failed audition for Norman Lear’s soon-to-be-legendary sitcom. Aaron Ruben’s short-lived ’70s dramedy series starred Andy Griffith as the headmaster at a reputable California private school, a world far removed from the folksy setting of “The Andy Griffth Show” but also one inflicted with very different problems — like in the third episode “Valerie Has an Emotional Gestalt for the Teacher,” where Reiner played a young teacher who gets caught having an affair with a student.
“Headmaster” is virtually impossible to watch nowadays, so we can only speculate how the show handled such a volatile storyline. Regardless, Reiner’s turn as a male authority figure who, in all likelihood, probably still held himself in high esteem despite his gross misconduct, was enough to earn him another shot at becoming the Meathead.
