‘70s Redux: ‘All in the Family’ and ‘The Jeffersons,’ Live

“Maude, Archie, Mike Stivic—they all talked about what they believed far more far more than they understood what they believed. They were all people who were not scholarly. They were arguing in the idiom of the moment, not out of deep understanding of the issues. And they were reflexively liberal or conservative. Archie, for example, was not a bigot in my mind. He was just afraid of tomorrow. Blacks moving into the neighborhood was a different world for him, and that was a future he was afraid of. But he wasn't a hater. He refused in one episode to sign an organization's racially hateful thing.”—Sitcom producer Norman Lear, creator of All in the Family, Maude, and The Jeffersons, quoted in John Jurgensen, “Influencers: Archie Bunker Returns, on Live TV,” The Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2019

All in the Family was the favorite TV show of my boyhood and youth. I loved it for more than its audacity in raising social issues, its absolutely appropriate casting of its leads, or simply its unerring ability to smake the audience laugh. 

No, I became a committed viewer for its depiction of a social environment I could recognize as my own, the blue-collar world of my parents, their relatives and friends. Archie Bunker might have been a figure of satire, but, especially as he collided with the outside world as the series went on, also a complicated human to whom attention needed to be paid. He was as real as any of my neighbors.

(Even closer to home, a number of people told my father that he looked like the actor whose reputation was made by playing Archie Bunker, Carroll O’Connor.)

I was curious, then, to hear that an episode of the show would air live last Wednesday, with different actors in the roles played by O’Connor, Jean Stapleton, Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers, and that the same format would be followed for its spinoff, The Jeffersons. I wondered how Norman Lear’s taboo-breaking sitcom would stand up over time. 

I feared for the worst. Sometimes in recent years, in catching old All in the Family reruns on TV, I thought that I could often figure out when they had aired from particular topical jokes. (I had never faced this dilemma with my other favorite show from the Seventies, The Mary Tyler Moore Show.) They could be, in a word I hate to hear on other occasions, “dated.” 

So, how would this experiment work now? Would it be a case of old wine in new bottles?

In terms of the script, for the "Henry's Farewell" episode from Season 4 in the fall of 1973 (and let us acknowledge here not only Lear, but also teleplay writer Don Nicholl), very well indeed. The studio audience, after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss, #MeToo and #TimesUp, whooped it up for the stout defenses of women’s rights by Gloria Stivic and Louise Jefferson, and—sensing more than a few parallels to the current political situation—they seemed to laugh and clap harder with each succeeding line in the following scene:

Archie: “Meathead, turn off the garbage on that radio.”

Mike: “Okay. I thought you'd be interested in hearing what King Richard was up to today.”

Archie: “And shut that hole in the middle of your face too, huh? Wise guy! Trying to insult the president by calling him a king.”

Gloria: “Why not? Nixon acts like one.”

Archie: “I've got news for you, little girl. Being a president is much better than being a king.”

Mike [straight-faced]: “You can probably make more money that way.”

Archie: “Get out of here, huh? Richard E. Nixon ain't interested in getting rich.”

Gloria: “He's not interested in getting rich? Why not?” 

Archie: “Because he's got plenty of money.”

Edith: “ ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into heaven.’”

Archie: “And it is easier for you to pass me the coffee than for me to go over there!”

But what this special made me realize, far more than ever before, was that the best lines from the original All in the Family could not have landed with such devastating force without excellent acting across the board, not just among its four principals but among its subsidiary players. Unfortunately, that comprehensive casting brilliance was far more hit or miss last week.

Whether screeching for the high notes on the show’s opening theme, “Those Were the Days,” hopping hurriedly from living room to kitchen, or looking befuddled, Marisa Tomei as Edith Bunker came the closest of the central quarter to matching her original inspiration, Jean Stapleton. 

Except for one flubbed line, Jamie Foxx also expertly channeled his predecessor, Sherman Helmsley, in conveying George Jefferson’s Bunker-like mixture of bigotry and familial warmth. Ellie Kemper and Anthony Anderson, taking over the roles of Gloria Stivic and Henry Jefferson, acquitted themselves very well, though not as markedly.

But, with a curly, dark-haired wig matched in ridiculousness only by his fake Italian accent, the normally clever Sean Hayes offered up an ethnic stereotype that verged close to offensive, and Ike Barinholtz could not match Rob Reiner’s arsenal of deadpan stares and comic timing as Mike Stivic. 

Worst of all, in the central role of Archie, Woody Harrelson was utterly miscast. While evoking Archie’s broad Queens accent well enough, he added assorted unnecessary hand gestures. While it was easy to imagine the burly O’Connor wanting nothing more at the end of the day than to collapse in his favorite chair with a beer at his side, the far leaner Harrelson looked like he’d just come from an invigorating pick-up basketball game or 18 rounds of golf. And it strained credulity to have one of America’s greatest cannabis enthusiasts playing a character with nothing but contempt for hippies and their mind-altering substances.

I am sorry that I did not watch more of The Jeffersons portion of the program. Due to scheduling conflicts during its original run, I had never been able to watch that sitcom as frequently as All in the Family.  

But the actors on the special (including Wanda Sykes as Louise Jefferson and Kerry Washington and Will Ferrell as the groundbreaking interracial couple, the Willises) appeared true to their original characters without simply copying the original actors. And Jennifer Hudson delivered a delightful rendition of the show’s theme, “Movin’ on Up.”

James Burrows, a veteran who has helmed some of TV’s classic sitcoms (Cheers, Friends), should have been a more-than-adequate replacement for John Rich as director of “Henry’s Farewell.” But, whether through his own fault or Lear’s, he was undone by the several instances of miscasting.

Nevertheless, I am glad the show aired and that a nationwide audience had a chance to think again about an episode of this classic sitcom that, while not perhaps one of the top 10 episodes of its nine-year run, was certainly superior to much of today's TV fare, on network TV or cable.

American divisions over race, ethnicity, class and culture linger tenaciously from the Vietnam-Watergate era when All in the Family reigned as the #1 show in prime time. But change did occur over time—with, in what would have been an extreme surprise to the audience when “Henry’s Farewell” first aired, America even electing a white President. 

African- and Hispanic-Americans have entered all kinds of occupations whose doors were once shut to them, and whites once unalterably opposed to that change have had to adjust. Close up, white Americans in such proximity have seen the humanity of their fellow citizens and are increasingly judging them more on what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. termed “the content of their character” than on the sum of their own fears.

I worry that Americans retreat into their self-selected circles of friends on social media or their red and blue states. Archie Bunker might have rolled his eyes and even barked at the Jeffersons and Mike Stivic, but he had to deal with them—and by the time the Jeffersons had moved off Hauser Street in Queens for the tonier precincts of Manhattan, he and they had come to understand each other at least a bit better. 

That close, sometimes uncomfortable encounter with the humanity of others might be the only way to bridge the gap between the Occupy Democrats and the Trump voters today.