TELEVISION : Remembering the Lenny Bruce of TV Sitcoms

Flash back to Jan. 12, 1971:

You’re watching TV when suddenly a voice from the set announces: “The program 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.”

Almost immediately, the 19-inch screen frames a middle-aged couple sitting at an upright piano with their eyes on the sheet music, the man faintly smirking, the woman grinning cheerfully. “Boy, the way Glenn Miller played,” he wails, pulling his cigar from his mouth. “Songs that made the Hit Parade,” she warbles in a contrasting high-pitched voice as her hands work the piano keys. “Guys like us, we had it made,” he sings.

Then the voices of Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton merge shrilly: “Those were the days!”

So they were, the days of vulgarspeak , of dingbats, meatheads and a modest house at fictional 704 Houser St. in the Corona section of Queens, where the racial epithets and malaprops (“It’s just a pigment of your imagination”) exploded.

Who were these people?

They were writer-producer Norman Lear’s people, the unforgettable faces and voices of television for almost a decade, that’s who. Just as the comfortably middle-class Huxtables of “The Cosby Show” would become America’s TV family of the ‘80s and the boisterous Conners of “Roseanne” and Bart’s funky brood on “The Simpsons” may become our TV families of the ‘90s, working-class Archie and Edith Bunker and their daughter, Gloria, and son-in-law, Mike, wore that crown for the ‘70s.

From 1971 to 1976, “All in the Family” ranked first in the prime-time Nielsen ratings, and after being toppled from the top spot still continued as one of CBS’ most popular shows, even subsequent to spinning off an altered version of itself (“Archie Bunker’s Place”) in 1979. So much a part of the national consciousness was this half-hour situation comedy that there was a mock campaign to run Archie for President, and in its heyday “All in the Family” was said to have reached an average of 50 million viewers weekly.

All it owed them was to make them laugh, and it did that with such astonishing consistency that it became one of TV’s funniest comedies ever.

More than merely funny, however, “All in the Family” was nothing less than a phenomenon, the shocking Lenny Bruce of sitcoms, its racial slurs and bedroom humor for the first time transforming this benign comedy format into a mirror of the worst part of ourselves, and occasionally the best part.

“All in the Family” didn’t politely open the door to brazen social commentary and candor in TV comedy, it chainsawed right through it, initially striking far more controversy than commercial success.

How ironic for a series that began so tenuously and whose origins were in an obscure 1967 notice in the entertainment trade paper Variety about a hit British TV series called “Till Death Us Do Part.” Its comedic protagonist was a coarse-talking Cockney bigot who continually argued politics with his family.

While reading the Variety item, Lear, then an up-and-coming movie writer/producer, was reminded of his father. With Bud Yorkin, his partner in Tandem Productions, Lear acquired U.S. television rights to the BBC series and convinced ABC to finance a pilot.

To play Archie, Lear chose O’Connor, a seasoned, stage-trained actor whose multitude of TV roles included many as a heavy. Archie was no stretch for O’Connor, a New Yorker who once had lived in Queens himself. “I found Archie pretty easy to play because I had known so many characters like that growing up in New York,” he says now.

In contrast to O’Connor, Stapleton’s TV work had been limited mostly to parts of “under five lines” when her agent recommended her to read for the role of Edith. “I had no insight into the world of television,” she says, “but I was so delighted with the material because it was so fresh and good. I thought, ‘Wow, this on TV!’ ”

Stapleton liked Edith, finding it funny “that she could puncture Archie’s hot hair and braggadocio with one remark.” Yet more than anything, Stapleton now recalls, “I was just grateful for the job.”

Lear was grateful, too. “I really felt that this piece of casting (O’Connor and Stapleton) was inspired,” he says, “not by the casting director or by me, but that it came from where I think most things come, from somewhere else.” He lifts his hands, palms up, implying spirituality. “That’s how golden that combination was.”

Although Lear had his Archie and Edith from the outset, Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers would not appear as the young couple until the series premiered on CBS. Lear used two differents sets of actors in those roles for the first ABC pilot and a subsequent remake of that pilot ordered by the network. ABC turned down the second pilot, too.

What ABC had vetoed was almost identical to the episode that would air later on CBS and introduce nearly everyone and everything that would typify “All in the Family” through the years: Edith was a “dingbat” whom Archie commanded to “stifle,” his son-in-law was a “meathead” and “dumb Polack,” Jews were “yids” and blacks were “spades.”

Titled “Meet the Bunkers,” the episode opened with Mike getting amorous with Gloria as the couple prepared a surprise Sunday morning brunch in honor of the Bunkers’ 22nd wedding anniversary, which the insensitive Archie had naturally forgotten. As the tightly embracing Mike and Gloria were heading upstairs to make love, they were surprised by Archie and Edith arriving home early from church. Archie eyed the young couple, immediately got the message and disapproved: “11:10 a.m. on a Sunday morning!”

The episode’s funniest and boldest exchange soon followed, with Archie calling Mike “the laziest white man I ever seen” and Mike complaining that Archie was labeling the entire black race lazy. “I never said your black beauties was lazy,” Archie replied. Pause. “It’s just their systems is geared a little slower than the rest of us.”

Perhaps it was ABC’s system that was geared a little slow. After being turned down by that network, Lear refused to give up on the Bunkers, and even contemplated turning them into a theatrical movie. There was no need, as it turned out.

“I sold that show in New York,” says Lear’s former partner Yorkin, who had directed both ABC pilots. Yorkin says he was showing the pilot to new CBS president Bob Wood--who was seeking to revitalize the network by attracting younger, more upscale viewers--when Fred Silverman, then the network’s young programming chief, happened by. “Fred just sat there mesmerized. He said, ‘We gotta put this thing on the air.’ ”

But trouble was still ahead.

By the time “Meet the Bunkers” was taped Dec. 15, 1970 at CBS in Los Angeles for its Jan. 12 premiere, Lear had already had long fights about the script with the network’s program-practices department.

“Their concerns were interesting,” he says, “because they were all about sex. On that first show we got the first taste of racial expletives out of Archie’s mouth, but I don’t recall any problems with that then.”

The director for the first taping, TV veteran John Rich (now executive producer of ABC’s “MacGyver”), would go on to direct 84 additional episodes and become the show’s producer. But on this December night, he had doubts that the episode about to be taped in front of a studio audience of about 400 would ever get on the air.

Rich noticed an unfamiliar face sitting behind him in the control room. “I’m Bob Wood, president of the network,” the unfamiliar face said. “I hope you know what you’re doing, because my job is on the line.”

Meanwhile, O’Connor went into that first taping thinking that if “All in the Family” was going to make history, it would be brief history. “I thought the press was going to love it and the public was going to dislike it,” he says. “I thought they were not ready to hear a real bigot saying the bigoted things Archie said.”

Apparently CBS had similar thoughts, resulting in “All in the Family” facing its first major crisis a month later, on the eve of its Jan. 12 premiere. Getting what Rich calls “traditional network cold feet,” CBS had begun insisting that the racially and sexually blunt “Meet the Bunkers” be replaced as the premiere by a far-milder episode that was scheduled to be aired second. “Norman came to me and asked me what I thought,” Rich says. “I told him: ‘If you give in now, they’ll own you forever.’ ”

Lear didn’t give in. Instead, an incredible behind-the-scenes drama unfolded the evening of Jan. 12. Only an hour before the scheduled 9:30 debut of “All in the Family” in the East, Lear and Yorkin were at CBS in Los Angeles on a conference call with Wood and Silverman, who were at CBS in New York. As the minutes ticked away, the two sides argued about which episode would go on.

It was a war. Wood and Silverman insisted that the safer episode originally designated to go second now be first. Lear and Yorkin insisted on “Meet the Bunkers.”

Recalls Yorkin: “We said we’d walk out if they put the second one on first. It was no hollow threat, but when we hung up that phone, I wasn’t sure we had convinced them.”

“There were some predictions that nothing at all would go on,” Rich says. The predictions were wrong. Rich: “Here came Archie and Edith singing into the camera. We had had our Cuban Missile Crisis, and CBS blinked.”

But ABC and NBC didn’t. Watched on only 15% of the TV sets in use that night, the premiere of “All in the Family” got clobbered in the Nielsen ratings. Bad ratings--the show was in a graveyard time slot--were to plague the series through the coming months. Only in May did the numbers begin to pick up dramatically. Then, after building through the summer, the Bunkers’ rising drum roll reached a crescendo in September. “All in the Family” now rested triumphantly atop the Nielsens. It also had a new time slot leading off Saturday night.

Even when the ratings were down, however, morale was high, Lear says. “We were alive with doing something good. I remember getting a call from Bob Wood after he had just seen the last scene of the episode (the sixth) when Sally had gotten pregnant and lost the baby and Archie was at her bed. He (Wood) was crying. So we had the joy of knowing we were affecting people.”

Were they ever, but not everyone was crying tears of joy. Leading the dissent was Laura Z. Hobson, author of “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” a milestone novel attacking anti-Semitism. She wrote a letter to the New York Times charging “All in the Family” with “dishonesty” in substituting “hebe” and “coon” for the even harsher “kike” and “nigger.” She also accused the show of doing more harm than good by making a bigot seem like a lovable buffoon.

“Oh, you bet that hurt,” says Lear. “And it triggered letters from other important Jews who said, ‘My God, what are you doing?’ But that turned around in a few months.” He had always intended Archie to be multifaceted, Lear says, because “a bigot who is not a total redneck is much more revealing of the human condition, and people are much more liable to see a little bit more of themselves in him.”

Besides, he adds, a racist “who would have any part burning a cross at somebody’s home . . . was nobody I could write about.”

“All in the Family” showed, as Reiner notes, that “people can be ignorant and still have loving, human qualities.” Those qualities evolved through the years, for unlike their counterparts on TV comedies past, the characters on “All in the Family” did not remain static and unaffected by the changing world around them. For one thing, Archie, at O’Connor’s insistance, ultimately stopped calling Edith “dingbat.” And Archie discovered, much to his astonishment, that he hadn’t become racially contaminated when kissed in his living room by Sammy Davis Jr.

“Archie became no less racist or less bigoted,” O’Connor says, “but he had to confine his remarks to what would pass. Not that he changed in his heart, but he had to become more generous with the time he gave to listening to other people.”

One of those he began listening to was Edith, whose personal transformation included menopause, surviving an attempted rape, briefly leaving Archie, getting a job against Archie’s wishes and temporarily giving up religion after a friend was murdered merely because he was a transvestite (“She was a nice fella,” Archie said). This latter two-part episode is one of Lear’s favorites because it shows Archie saddened by Edith’s loss of faith (Church always produced a “beautiful, peaceful look on your face,” he told her, “like you was chloroformed or something.”)

Meanwhile, there was Mike’s impotence and vasectomy, and the personal growth in Gloria paralleled that of the nation’s women’s movement.

The start of the 1977-78 season found Archie giving up his job to purchase and operate Kelsey’s Bar, which he promptly renamed after himself. At the end of that season, Struthers and Reiner (who would go on to become one of Hollywood’s hottest directors) left the show.

“All in the Family” underwent a name change to “Archie Bunker’s Place” at the start of the 1979-80 season, at the end of which Stapleton left the show. Managing to avoid typecasting as Edith, she went on to a number of acclaimed TV movie appearances and now co-stars on the CBS comedy series “Bagdad Cafe,” which recently went out of production.

Continuing on with only O’Connor from the original foursome, a revamped “Archie Bunker’s Place” revealed in its first episode of the 1980-81 season that Edith had died of a stroke.

Stapleton: “I was on tour with a play in Florida when Bud Yorkin called me and then Norman called me and told me what they wanted to do and why, that they wanted to expand Archie’s part. I had no vested interest in the show and had no desire to do the part any more. I said to Norman, ‘She’s only fiction.’ There was a long pause, and I thought, ‘My God, I’ve offended him.’ Then he said to me, ‘She isn’t.’ ”

In 1983, “Archie Bunker’s Place” joined Edith in sitcom heaven, meaning that the Bunkers would now live on only in syndicated reruns--albeit lucratively. O’Connor maintained a high profile on TV and now co-stars on the NBC series “In the Heat of the Night.”

Although likened by some to a TV Moses using “All in the Family” to part the Red Seas of ignorance, Lear now insists that his primary intent was to entertain, not to change society, and that his series did nothing more than “lift up the apparent.” He adds: “I mean, they were saying far worse things than this in the schools and on the playgrounds. If I had any sense that this little half-hour situation comedy was going to reverse or change or even seriously affect 2,000 or 2,500 years of bigotry, I would have to be some kind of fool.”

It was only after others began treating “All in the Family” as a gleaming icon, Lear says, that “I might have spent too much time thinking we were doing something important and gotten lost in that ego-gratifying bull.”

“All in the Family” did give television a much-needed, short-term enema, flushing hours of refuse from a medium that had been largely an electronic landfill. “The show was more of an oasis than something revolutionary,” Reiner notes. “When it went off the air, all the garbage came back on.”

What did “All in the Family” achieve? Lear: “The glorious part of the whole exercise was . . . we did it.” And that, as Archie might observe, is no pigment of anyone’s imagination.