Hello Tacomaman,
Consider the times bud......) Archie was portrayed without the sense of "politically correctness" that exists today. People laughed at the dumb stuff Bunker would say. The public didnt hate Bunker, nor did they consider him a threat threat to decency.
Archie Bunker and Carroll O'Connor could hardly be more different people. Archie was a tribute to Carrol's acting ability.
Carrol was actually a liberal who did a really good acting job. He had a Master's Degree in speech. He thought 'All In The Family' would flop:
"O'Connor was living in Italy in 1968 when producer Norman Lear first asked him to come to New York City and star in a series which he was creating for ABC with the title Justice For All, with O'Connor playing Archie Justice, a lovable yet controversial bigot. After three television pilots of the sitcom were produced between 1968 and 1970, the network which was supposed to broadcast it was changed to CBS, the last name of its main character was changed to Bunker, and its title was changed to All in the Family. The show was based on the BBC's Till Death Us Do Part, and Bunker was based on Alf Garnett, but he was somewhat less abrasive than the original British character. O'Connor's Queens background and his New York accent both influenced Lear to set the show in Queens.[12]
Wanting a well-known actor to play the lead, Lear had approached Jackie Gleason and Mickey Rooney: both of them declined. O'Connor accepted the role, because he did not expect the show to be a success and he believed that he would be able to move back to Europe when it failed. In her book Archie & Edith, Mike & Gloria: the Tumultuous History of All in the Family, Donna McCrohan noted that O'Connor requested that Lear provide him with a return airplane ticket to Rome as a condition of his acceptance of the role, so he could return to Italy when the show failed. Instead, 'All in the Family' became the highest-rated show on American television for five consecutive seasons.
O'Connor's own politics were liberal. He understood the Bunker character and played him not only with bombast and humor, but with touches of vulnerability. The writing on the show was consistently left of center, but O'Connor, while personifying right wing views also often deftly skewered the liberal pieties of the day. Bunker was famous for his English language malapropisms; O'Connor was in truth a highly educated and cultured man, and taught English before he turned to acting.[13] Archie Bunker's long-suffering wife Edith, was played by Jean Stapleton, also from New York City, a Broadway actress whom Lear remembered from the play and film Damn Yankees. The show also starred unknown character actors, such as Rob Reiner as Archie's liberal son-in-law, Michael "Meathead" Stivic, and Sally Struthers as Archie and Edith's only child and Mike's wife, Gloria. The cast had a unique on- and off-camera chemistry, especially between O'Connor and Reiner, who became best friends.[citation needed]
CBS was unsure whether the controversial subject matter of All in the Family would fit well into a sitcom. Racial issues, ethnicities, religions, class, education, women's equality, gun control, politics, inflation, the Vietnam war, energy crisis, Watergate and other timely topics of the 1970s were addressed. Like its British predecessor Till Death Us Do Part, the show lent dramatic social substance to the traditional sitcom format. Archie Bunker's popularity made O'Connor a top-billing star of the 1970s. O'Connor was afraid of being typecast for playing the role, but at the same time he was protective not just of his character, but of the entire show.[citation needed]
A contract dispute between O'Connor and Lear marred the beginning of the show's fifth season. Eventually O'Connor got a raise, and appeared in the series until it ended. For his work as Archie Bunker, he was nominated for eight Emmy Awards as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series; he won the award four times (1972, 1977, 1978 and 1979). At the end of the eighth season in 1978, Reiner and Struthers left the series to pursue other projects, but O'Connor and Stapleton still had one year left on their contracts.[citation needed]
Rob Reiner said in a 2014 interview about his on- and off-screen chemistry with O'Connor, "We did over 200 shows in front of a live audience. So I learned a lot about what audiences like, what they don't like, how stories are structured. I would spend a lot of time in the writing room and I actually wrote some scripts. And from Carroll O'Connor I learned a lot about how you perform and how important the script and story are for the actors. So the actor doesn't have to push things. You can let the story and the dialogue support you if it's good. I had great people around me and I took from all the people who were around." He also stated, when he compared Carroll O'Connor's character to his acting mentor's real-life persona: "Carroll O'Connor brought his humanity to the character even though he had these abhorrent views. He's still a feeling, human being. He loved his wife even though he acted the way he did, and he loved his daughter. Those things come out. I don't think anybody's all good or all bad."[14] "
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