The Show That Changed Television Forever

Lear’s agent pushed the concept to CBS. Wood was initially hesitant, but soon recognized that he had found his conversation starter. He later explained his thinking to the sociologist Todd Gitlin: “I really thought the pilot was very, very funny … It sure seemed to me a terrific way to test this whole attitude about the network.” Just a year after Wood buried the Smothers Brothers, he gave new life to Archie Bunker.

Even with Wood’s support, the show faced formidable headwinds within CBS. William Paley, the autocratic chairman of the board, hated it from the outset, considering it vulgar. But Wood was determined. “Bob Wood had balls,” said James Rosenfield, an ad salesman at the time who went on to become the president of CBS. “He really had balls, and what I never understood to this day was how that happened, because Bob Wood came out of sales. He didn’t have any clout with the Hollywood community. He didn’t know Norman Lear, but he understood that there was an opportunity here for significant change in the medium, and he made it happen.”

With the go-ahead from CBS, Lear reshaped the cast with new choices for the younger roles. For Gloria, the Bunkers’ daughter, he chose Sally Struthers, a young blonde whom Lear had seen on the Smothers Brothers and in the movie Five Easy Pieces. For Mike, the son-in-law, Lear looked closer to home, casting Rob Reiner, the son of his longtime friend Carl Reiner. In addition to his writing for the Smothers Brothers, the younger Reiner, with long hair and unabashedly liberal views, had become the go-to casting pick for the industry’s stilted first attempts to acknowledge the changing youth culture, on individual episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies and Gomer Pyle. “I was like the resident Hollywood hippie,” Reiner said later.

For the director, Lear chose John Rich, a skilled television veteran whom he had met two decades earlier. Coincidentally, Rich had been approached at almost exactly the same time to direct The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which preceded All in the Family on the air at CBS by four months. While Mary was pathbreaking in its own, quieter way—illustrating the changing roles of women in American society through deft and affectionate character studies—to Rich the show didn’t appear nearly as revolutionary as Lear’s project. “It was 1970, and the dialogue that was written then just blew me away,” Rich remembered. “And I called Norman … I said, ‘You aren’t going to make this, are you?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Is anybody going to put it on?’ He said, ‘They say they will.’”

Rich’s uncertainty, even incredulity, was widely shared. Even with CBS’s approval, the show’s future always seemed tenuous to the cast and crew as they worked toward their January 1971 premiere. “We knew we were doing something good, but we didn’t think anybody was going to go for this,” Reiner remembered. O’Connor was so skeptical that the show would survive that he held on to the lease for the apartment in Rome where he had been living and made Lear promise to pay for a first-class ticket back if the show was canceled.

Lear, too, felt that CBS’s commitment was only conditional. Yes, Wood had bought the show, but he remained skittish about it. “He wanted to take a chance, but he fought me tooth and nail,” Lear remembered. Wood and CBS were simply uncertain that a show this different from their usual programming would find an audience. “That’s all they worried about,” Lear said. “It’s as simple as ‘We don’t know if this works.’ We know the Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction—we know that works. We don’t know if this works.” During the filming of an early episode, Rich was in the control room when Wood stopped by the set. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he told the director, “because my rump is on the line here.” Just weeks before the show was scheduled to air, CBS still had failed to sell any advertising to air with it.

From the start, Lear participated in an unrelenting push and pull with the CBS censors over the show’s language and content. The network’s caution was evident in the time slot it selected for the show: Tuesday, a night it didn’t view as pivotal, at 9:30 p.m., between Hee Haw and the CBS News Hour. In advance of the premiere, Wood sent a telegram to CBS affiliates quoting a speech he’d delivered the previous spring: “We have to broaden our base,” he wrote. “We have to attract new viewers. We’re going to operate on the theory that it is better to try something new than not to try it and wonder what would have happened if we had.”