Far, Far Away from Archieland : Carroll O’Connor made television history with the bigoted Mr. Bunker in the ‘70s. But this week’s events on his current series, “In the Heat of the Night,” point up how much the prime-time landscape has changed since then

It is late afternoon and Carroll O’Connor is walking through the Beverly Wilshire Hotel when a couple of female tourists, armed with cameras, spot him. He poses, cracks a couple of jokes and then heads for a table in the bar, where he polishes off a sandwich and a nonalcoholic beer.

He is relaxed but quietly revving himself up--planning a rest at his house in Mexico before resuming production in Georgia this week on the eighth season of his surprisingly tenacious CBS show, “In the Heat of the Night.”

Once upon a time, when you thought of O’Connor, you thought of only one thing: Archie Bunker in “All in the Family.” Thus it is something of a milestone that in Wednesday’s episode of “In the Heat of the Night,” the actor once known for playing TV’s most famous bigot will marry a black woman in his latest role as Bill Gillespie, a sheriff in the Deep South. The bride is played by Denise Nicholas, who portrays a city councilwoman long involved with Gillespie.

Says O’Connor: “People say, ‘It’s curious. You were once playing a character that wouldn’t dream of this kind of a marriage.’ Well, the character I’m playing now wouldn’t dream of that kind of marriage either, but things happened to him that didn’t happen to Archie Bunker. A kind of insight and enlightenment happened to Gillespie. And the same kind of enlightenment happened to her. They found they liked to be with each other an awful lot. And they were laughing at things together, a big step forward in a love relationship.”

To a female viewer who didn’t like the interracial romantic relationship that was developing, O’Connor wrote: “What are they going to do? He likes her and she likes him.”

*

In its quiet way, “In the Heat of the Night,” honored several times by the NAACP Image Awards, has evolved into a series about black and white relationships, despite network TV’s disgraceful history of avoiding dramas about African Americans. If it is not a show that comes to grips in a breakthrough manner with the dramatic realities of black family life, especially the urban experience, it is nonetheless a lot more than what the television industry expected when the series debuted.

Under O’Connor, who quickly took control of the show as executive producer, “In the Heat of the Night” has maneuvered its way through a challenging maze of obstacles and backstage problems that added up to an intriguing drama of its own:

Would the public accept O’Connor as anyone but Archie? In real life, there was the publicity about the drug and alcohol problems of co-star Howard Rollins. In the second season, O’Connor underwent sextuple heart bypass surgery. And then there was the matter of no compromise in the ongoing interracial romance that culminates with Wednesday’s marriage.

In addition, NBC, which launched the series, let it go despite decent ratings because its viewership skewed older--but CBS quickly snapped it up two seasons ago. And throughout its run, “In the Heat of the Night” has often found itself up against television’s hottest series, including “Moonlighting,” “Roseanne,” “Coach” and, most recently, “Home Improvement.”

While “All in the Family” was perhaps the greatest situation comedy in TV history, O’Connor, 69, says that he has been buoyed in “In the Heat of the Night” by the fact that, as an admitted liberal, he is playing someone closer to his heart than Archie.

“Yes. Sure. Archie wasn’t even close. Gillespie is a lot closer. Gillespie has changed his mind. The funny thing about Archie is that he wouldn’t change his mind. That was the fun, the comedy and the satire. That’s what you laughed at. He never laughed at anything himself, Archie. The world was a painful place to him. And because it was painful to him, it was funny to you. You got a kick out of watching a guy who was constantly in pain over things that you take for granted.”

Flat out, which character does he prefer?

“I prefer this character (Gillespie). But I’m probably influenced in that by my augmented status with the show. I mean more to this show as executive producer, head writer, the star, the guy who even passes on the ladies’ wigs. It involves me more than Archie did. So it’s more fun.”

Pausing for a moment, O’Connor adds what fans of “All in the Family” already know--that despite his later success as Gillespie, “I’ll never play a better part than Archie. He was the best character, the most fulfilling character, and I never thought it was going to develop that way. There’s no role that can top that.”

According to O’Connor and new CBS Entertainment President Peter Tortorici, “In the Heat of the Night” is scheduled to return next season as a group of two-hour movies, but will also be on call, if needed, to step in with one-hour episodes instead.

“The conditions,” O’Connor says, “are that the network has ordered four two-hour movie productions. But they have ordered seven two-hour scripts. They’ve asked me to do something that they’ve asked before--to be prepared to break these down into one-hours should they change their minds. So supposedly, while they’re ordering seven two-hour movies, in their heads they’re ordering 14 one-hours.”

*

O’Connor, who won a best actor Emmy for “In the Heat of the Night” in 1989--he already had four for “All in the Family”--downplays the idea that he had a problem being accepted as a Southern law officer after his years as Archie: “If you’ll forgive me, this conception of images sticking so hard to performers that they can’t perform freely is a notion of the press.”

The key, he says, was playing a role different from Archie: “If an actor does something entirely different and makes good on it, the public will go right with him. Bucking the image is really a problem with producers. They could have said, ‘He’s too well-known as Archie Bunker now. Get Rod Steiger (who starred with Sidney Poitier in the Academy Award-winning 1967 movie version of “In the Heat of the Night”). Or get somebody more like Rod Steiger.’

“NBC told Fred Silverman (O’Connor’s co-executive producer on “In the Heat of the Night”) that if they got me to do the show, they’d say yes. Fred came and said, ‘If you say yes, we’ll have a deal within two weeks.’ We made a deal within 10 days.”

The problems surrounding Rollins, a brilliant actor (“Ragtime,” “A Soldier’s Story”), were more complex. There were various incidents; in March, 1988, for instance, the actor was arrested on charges of drunk driving and drug possession. Last year, he served a brief jail term following traffic violations; he had previously been on probation stemming from drunk driving charges.

Publicly, both he and O’Connor professed mutual admiration during their personal crises. “I’m very fond of this man,” O’Connor says. And after O’Connor had his bypass, Rollins said: “I was sad, and I missed him.”

Nonetheless, changes finally were made in the series. Rollins had played O’Connor’s chief of detectives, but now he became a law student and eventually an attorney in the series, making only occasional appearances. Carl Weathers was brought in as a new co-star.

Real life and fiction continued to blend as the cast changes affected O’Connor’s role as well. With Weathers as the new police chief of the series’ fictional town of Sparta, Miss., O’Connor, who previously had that post, became a regional county sheriff instead. The plot ploy here was that the Sparta City Council, while not admitting it, did not like Gillespie’s interracial romance and forced him out of his job as chief.

“It worried a lot of people when I wanted to make the change” from police chief to sheriff, says O’Connor, “but I had to make that job change to attract Carl Weathers. I had to make him the chief of police.”

O’Connor’s bypass at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta in March, 1989, was yet another real-life situation that the series had to deal with. Did the actor, a hard worker, contemplate quitting?

“No,” he says at first, then adds: “I thought about it, but the doctors said, ‘You don’t have to. You’ll be fine. Go ahead.’ I wanted to get back to work. They did the last four shows of that season without me.”

How did the cast of his series react? “They were worried,” says O’Connor, “but they were reassured that I was going to be fine and that I’d be back, and so all was well.”

And his wife, Nancy? “She didn’t want me to quit, no, unless it was essential, and it wasn’t,” says the actor. “She was happy that I didn’t have to.”

*

In the past, O’Connor acknowledged that “I’ve always been very cranky about the material.” On “All in the Family,” he has said, “I used to get into bitter arguments with writers, directors and producers, saying, ‘This is wrong for me or the wrong thing to be doing or saying. I don’t like this. I don’t like that. This is not a good joke. This is not funny’--all those things. And I’d get into arguments. And they’d become furious. I wasn’t always right. I can really remember the times that I was wrong, and I’m very sorry for losing my temper and being a boor during ‘All in the Family.’ ”

His tenacity, however, remains, as he has changed the interracial course of “In the Heat of the Night” to its present direction without making grand pronouncements up front.

“You can’t do that,” he says. “The minute you state a policy, the networks say, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s examine this. Is this what we want to do? Is this where we want to go? Is this going to become a black-white show?’--as, in fact, mine has become. If I had said to them five years ago that I want to make this a black-white show, they wouldn’t know what I was talking about. I wouldn’t know what I was talking about myself if I had told them in those terms.

“So what I did say to network officials was, ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, we have to be cognizant of conditions in the South today and the population changes in the South. I just want our show to reflect what is happening in the Deep South.’ They said, ‘Sure, sure,’ because that’s sort of a generalized thing and they could accept that. I just did the show and the racial thing was part of the whole tapestry against which we were playing. To suppress the prominence of blacks in Southern life today is to alter the whole texture of the tapestry.”

There were, however, some related problems in the series’ early days, says O’Connor. When the show first started, it was shot in Louisiana and, says the actor, at that time he began pressing for more blacks on the program. The original motion picture, he notes, was released in 1967 “but this was now 1987 when we began--20 years later. I began arguing about reality.

“I suddenly thought, ‘I can’t continue doing this series.’ This was the first seven shows we did. I said, ‘Yes, I have a contract, but I’ll just go and tell them I can’t live up to the contract and I am physically, psychologically, unable to continue with this.’ ” He remained, however, but was still unhappy about the show’s direction.

In 1989, after the show’s second season, says O’Connor, “I went to MGM (the producing studio) and said, ‘It’s over. It’s over. I can’t go on.’ I’d had the heart operation by that time. They said, ‘What do you want to do, take over the show?’ I said, ‘Yes, exactly. That’s exactly what I want to do.’

“And they said, ‘Even if we let you take over the show, how could you take over as executive producer after this thing you’ve just been through? You’ll have enough to do.’ I said, ‘Listen, I feel better than I’ve felt in years, and I can do it, and I will do it, and I want to do it, and unless you let me do it, I’m out of here.’

“So then I took over, and for better or for worse, I’ve got what I wanted.”

In Wednesday’s scheduled marriage broadcast, the episode ends with the ceremony and a final freeze-frame of the wedding kiss of O’Connor and Nicholas.

And next season?

“Well, of course she (Nicholas) writes for me too,” says O’Connor. “So now all of us who write for the program will get some ideas. We’re just a married couple now. She works for the city, I work for the county.”

Since 1971, when “All in the Family” debuted, O’Connor has been a formidable TV force, following that series with “Archie Bunker’s Place” and “In the Heat of the Night.” In head-on competition, for instance, “Archie Bunker’s Place” walloped one of TV’s hottest series, Robin Williams’ “Mork & Mindy.”

“In the Heat of the Night” also showed muscle against “Roseanne” and “Moonlighting.” Is O’Connor disappointed at the new, occasional status of his show on CBS?

“No, not at all. I don’t think anybody figured we’d go eight seasons. They figured with any good luck, we’d do five. That’s really all that MGM or anybody wanted to do. It gives you over 100 shows, and you can go into syndication with that. We’re already in syndication and doing very well. I feel fulfilled. I’m the one who determines what goes on film. If you don’t like it, don’t blame anybody but me.”