Stifle, Dingbat!

Xmastime superslice of superslices All in the Family premiered 50 years ago this year, so I guess a new article about how it changed television isn't totally random, and I don't really need an excuse to post about it anyways. Here's a little taste inside an unusually thorough write-up:

Throughout his childhood in Connecticut and Brooklyn, Lear’s parents immersed him in an environment of barely controlled chaos. The two of them, Lear would often say, “lived at the ends of their nerves and the tops of their lungs.” At the peak of argument, the veins in his neck bulging, Lear’s father would beat his fists against his chest and bellow at Lear’s mother, “Jeanette, stifle yourself.”

CBS’s ambivalence crystallized into a single choice: which episode to air first. Lear wanted to start with the third version of the pilot, which he had taped with the new cast. Viewed even decades later, the episode is explosive. Summoning painful memories, viscerally connected to his characters, Lear, then in his mid-40s, found in his script a passionate and urgent voice he had never before tapped. Within minutes, Archie is raging against “your spics and your spades”; complaining about “Hebes” and “Black beauties”; calling Edith a “silly dingbat” and telling her to “stifle” herself; and describing Mike as a “dumb Polack” and “the laziest white man I’ve ever seen”—the latter a reprise of an insult that Herman Lear used to direct at his son. Mike, just as heatedly, is blaming crime on poverty and insisting that he and Gloria see no evidence that God exists. In the opening scene, Archie and Edith arrive home early from church and catch Mike kissing Gloria amorously as he carries her toward the bedroom. Archie is scandalized: “11:10 on a Sunday morning,” he grumbles in his thick Queens patois.

This was all a bit much for CBS, especially the “Sunday morning” line—which clearly suggested that the young couple was on their way to have sex (during daylight, no less). The network insisted that Lear take it out; he refused. Wood offered a compromise: The line could stay in if Lear agreed to push the pilot episode back to the second week and run the projected second show first. Lear refused again. He believed the pilot episode presented “Archie in full,” with all his prejudices and animosities on open display. Airing it was like jumping into the deep end of a pool; CBS and Lear together would “get fully wet the first time out,” as Lear later described it. In what would become a common occurrence, Lear told Wood he would quit if CBS started with the second episode.

Here's the first episode. You're welcome, Earth!