The Show That Changed Television Forever
All in the Family was the first program to genuinely reckon with the cultural upheaval of 1960s America. TV would never be the same.Editor’s Note: Norman Lear, the prolific producer who transformed television, died on December 5, 2023, at age of 101.
His career was almost too long to contemplate: Lear fought in World War II, wrote for the golden age of television in the 1950s, and was still developing shows in the 2020s. But he left his most indelible mark on television, and American popular culture more broadly, with his pathbreaking development of one show in particular, as Ronald Brownstein explained in this excerpt from his 2021 book, Rock Me on the Water.
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’s father, Archie Bunker, a reactionary bigot and Richard Nixon–loving dockworker—as Edith, the daffy but benevolent wife and mother, looked on. Incarnated by a stellar cast and energized by brilliant writing and directing, it became a television landmark, widely lauded as one of the greatest and most influential shows ever.
“Norman said on the phone, ‘I just haven’t been able to say yes to this,’” she recalled. “I said, ‘Norman, you realize don’t you, she is only fiction,’ And there was a long pause. And I thought, ‘I’ve hurt this dear man that I love so much.’ And then the voice came back to me, ‘She isn’t.’ But, shortly thereafter, he gave the word, and they made Edith die.”
