When The Family Moved In....

 

It was 1979.  I was all of eleven and just about ready to give up on prime-time TV after the long decay and departure of one of my most relied-upon weekly tube visits:  All In The Family.  The show basically signed itself off that spring, allegedly to return as Archie Bunker’s Place, the focus on Archie’s new identity as tavern owner, and the adventures within.  TV viewers one and all by this time well knew the ills of “shark-jumping”, as demonstrated by Garry Marshall’s Happy Days two seasons earlier.  Far as I was concerned, All In The Family went much further off the cliff in its final two seasons.

You wouldn’t be able to tell the late, great creator Norman Lear that.  To his insistence, the attempted rape on Edith Bunker, the cruel, tragic street death of her friend the cross-dressing Beverly LaSalle, Archie’s face-to-face encounter with lesbianism, the departure of Mike & Gloria and their subsequently failed marriage, the arrival and residence of Edith’s ten-year old niece Stephanie, and Archie’s struggle in realizing his dream as saloon owner were all no less than relevant and necessary life structures completely germane to the existence of our extended family.   Somehow, at my formidable and media-advanced age of eleven, I was more inclined to perceive it as a corporate television network desperation strategy.  The point is, Carroll O’Connor, who spent the duration of the show’s run in publicly reported walkoff-threat stalemate, was by 1979 prepared to continue when every other original cast member was in split mode.

I had no misconceptions about the fact that the pending Sunday night watered-down all-new Archie recipe would not replace the Saturday night uproar that welded my characteristically warring family for thirty minutes each week around the ’62 black-n-white Zenith for a solid few years at least.  But something much more important was about to happen, anyway.

It was announced that fall that all episodes of All In The Family were about to roll out in nightly strip syndication, meaning Channel 5, six nights a week at 7:30pm, and for good measure 11pm Sunday nights, right before The David Susskind Show.  I couldn’t believe it,  But I wasn’t exactly stunned.

I long knew about the gift of strip syndication.  It was the stuff of my earliest TV awareness.  The Lucy Show, The Andy Griffith Show, Petticoat Junction, My Three Sons…..Basically every show my kitten eyes glimpsed in network departure at first were now ubiquitous décor.  A little ABC show I’d been introduced to called The Odd Couple was now this hot 11PM weeknight thing on Channel 11.  It’s like the sandwich meat you always liked for occasional lunch now becoming a frequent condiment spread for other meals.  Every day of the week.

And now that dinner treat was All In The Family.  I was quite elated. This was around the time that I had little or nothing to look forward to sitcom-wise in prime time. 8PM meant lots of time for homework after dinner, if none of my favorite movies were on. The only TV I really kind of leaned on was anything prior to 8PM, which were those independent-channel prior-network sitcom reruns. Nothing bad about The Honeymooners, The Odd Couple or The Dick Van Dyke Show, even if I could recite half the episodes (or all of them) like favorite songs.  But that’s kind of the idea behind strip syndication, believe it or not.  It’s a reunion with the iconic TV treats you remember best…..kind of like favorite songs on the radio.  Music stations have “play lists”, that strategically program songs they know their listeners cherish most and know best.  TV stations did this with sitcom reruns. 

Trouble was, those Andy Griffith, My Three Sons and The Brady Bunch episodes were getting a little too monotonous, to the point where you wanted to play an obnoxious round of Mystery Science Theater 2000 with them to break the excruciating boredom.  When you have the urge to begin vandalizing the greats, that’s bad news.

Life breathed its way in the door when All In The Family arrived.  While in fact the show’s long run was being re-lived each weekday on CBS for the past four years, it was not at such a highly accessible viewing hour.  This new implant would, certainly in the New York-New Jersey region, if not nationwide, transplant this already-renown TV icon into the infinite lexicon.

It probably started out that way.  Anyone with any enjoyable familiarity with the show would be reuniting fondly on a nightly basis.  In my home, we certainly did.  For the first time ever I could have dinner along with the best act of the evening, and properly attack the homework before bedtime.  Much of the tri-state must have agreed, because the 7:30 time slot held for at least a good three years or more.

By year three however, the best act in the house kind of lost something.  With that kind of rigid repetition, it sort of makes sense.  Not too many comedies of limited run can withstand that kind of ubiquity.  The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy, known for their rooted Commedia-Del-Arte composition, packages like The Three Stooges or Laurel & Hardy will likely play that way through the next millennium or more.  All In The Family, as a sitcom of a more modern age, is a different story.

The show began it’s run in 1971.  The characterizations were still very pre-formed, and the composite on the screen was just that:  A trial run with promise.  That weird experiment of a show, a four-piece band that hadn’t quite found their sound or synergy yet, was in it’s first ten episodes little more than an odd comic depiction of a foregone sociopolitically heated period.  While Norman Lear was intent upon getting this hot commentary on the air in its time, no network would take a chance until CBS saw the promise in its domestic humor, just a few years after the holocaust of the 1960s, and agreed to put this now-comic cartoon strip of a period depiction on the air.

In the early seventies, this had its place. It was more or less in context.  Now, flashing onto TV screens every full-series go-round (off-network rerun cycles in those days mostly ran chronologically..), in a world full of dinner hour The Muppet Show, Family Feud, Entertainment Tonight, and anything else uber-80s, we had these grainy-orange, color-faded tape remnants of a foolish era, when youth resignation ruled.  It was the equivalent of playing your folks’ old early Donovan or Joan Baez worn-out LPs on your little portable suitcase-styled phonograph each night, those acoustic little whispers beneath the snap-crackle-and-pop of scratched vinyl.

Those historic artifacts of 1971, appreciable in their own right as such, were now, to no one’s fault, badly out of place.  A modern art exhibit probably wouldn’t fare all that well to an arts crowd in the concourse of a shopping mall.  Yet this was what the delicate history of one of television’s most pivotal contributions to our modern culture was now reduced to.  If you saw your favorite ballad on the roster of a jukebox inside a raucous barroom with a TV and video games blaring deafeningly, would you drop a quarter and play your song..? Probably not, if you had any interest in listening to it.  The same kind of justice was now being robbed of one of TV history’s great early foundations.

The gift in the strip syndication of All In The Family nonetheless however, was the blessed installment of some of those brilliant and perennial verbal exchanges and misguided insights of ironic brilliance into our daily and nightly lives, almost something ecumenical, a spiritual offering.  And every so often, my folks and I would in fact find ourselves wrapped around the TV together when one of those old flickers were before us, and we’d roar together like never before.  The lesson just might have been that life itself, the one we have to live, is bigger and more consuming than a brilliant little sitcom we look forward to once a week.  But we can instead find time throughout our struggled week to recall that wit, and mine that laughter.

Even the ancient aspect of those obtuse early episodes trapped in historic time end up maintaining kind of a Warhol-exhibit quality that one can appreciate from some Lichtenstein-esque standpoint.  I long certainly have.  It’s kind of like the TV commercials and preserved station continuity captures randomly uploaded on YouTube.  I’ll visit those precious historic treasures often.  And I’ve been predictably asked by some, just what is the allure in all that old junk, anyway…?

I’ll never be able to answer that one, and won’t, for one very simple reason.  You can’t explain art.  But when it plays in the middle of a shopping mall concourse, I’m pretty sure that’s where I’ll be.

Noah F.