Lara Zarum praises Saul Austerlitz’s Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes from I Love Lucy to Community for illustrating “the beauty of TV: if you sit close enough, you can see a faint outline of your reflection in the screen”:
Unlike film or literature, Austerlitz observes, TV needs the active participation of an audience in order to keep showing up on our screens every week. There’s a reason it reflects our lives (Roseanne) or a fantasy of them (Leave it to Beaver). The sitcom’s cozy relationship with its audience verges on unhealthy codependence. Its basic structure may have varied little over the course of its history, but sitcoms have to be flexible in order to suit the desires and responses of the viewers: When All in the Family’s racist, bigoted Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) received the surprising and overwhelming admiration of TV audiences, the show had to dance on the line between “approval and condemnation of its prime instigator.”
Emily Nussbaum zeroes in on how Bunker’s bigotry both influenced and reflected cultural divides:
In Season 8, there’s a trenchant sequence in which Archie, drunk and trapped in a storage room with Michael, talks about his childhood. Yes, his father said “nigger” while he was growing up, Archie says—everybody did—and when Michael tells him what his father said was wrong, Archie delivers a touching, confused defense of the man who raised him, who held his hand, but who also beat him and shoved him in a closet. It was all out of love, Archie insists.
“How could any man that loves you tell you anything that’s wrong?” he murmurs, just before he passes out. The scene should have been grotesquely manipulative and mawkish, but, strengthened by O’Connor’s affecting performance, it makes [series producer Norman] Lear’s point more strongly than any op-ed, even decades later: bigotry is resilient, because rejecting it often means rejecting your own family.
Civil-rights advocates, including the National Urban League and the Anti-Defamation League, tended to share [critic Laura Z.] Hobson’s distrust of the series. (In contrast, the A.C.L.U. awarded Lear the Freedom of the Press Award, in 1973.) Bill Cosby, who was a major TV star after “I Spy,” downright despised Archie Bunker. Even a decade later, on “The Phil Donahue Show,” Cosby was still expressing frustration that Bunker had never apologized for anything, making him “a hero to too many Americans for his shortsightedness, his tunnel vision.” He added, “And I’m really a believer that the show never taught or tried to teach anybody anything.”
To critics, the show wasn’t the real problem: its audience was. In 1974, the social psychologists Neil Vidmar and Milton Rokeach offered some evidence for this argument in a study published in the Journal of Communication, using two samples, one of teen-agers, the other of adults. Subjects, whether bigoted or not, found the show funny, but most bigoted viewers didn’t perceive the program as satirical. They identified with Archie’s perspective, saw him as winning arguments, and, “perhaps most disturbing, saw nothing wrong with Archie’s use of racial and ethnic slurs.” Lear’s series seemed to be even more appealing to those who shared Archie’s frustrations with the culture around him, a “silent majority” who got off on hearing taboo thoughts said aloud.
(Video: Archie and Mike in a scene from All in the Family, “Two’s a Crowd,” February 12, 1978)
The Dish 