"All In The Family" remake

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Ridgerunner said:
The media’s obsession with race, including its hatred of whites, is truly bizarre. But it’s amusing to watch Mexican soap operas. There are more blondes on that than there are on the streets of Stockholm. (mild exaggeration, but only mild) Racism against whites is not universal.
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My wife’s reaction after watching some tv on a recent trip to the Yucatan (these were commercials mostly as the actual programming we were watching was American): ‘no one looks Mexican.’
 
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DeniseNY said:
The seasons when John Amos was on the show were definitely the best. IMO, he was one of TV’s greatest dads. When the show started to focus on JJ and “dyn-o-mite” it turned into a completely different show. I believe that’s something that both John Amos and Esther Rolle were upset about.
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I loved John Amos in that role and looking back on it now, I think this was one of the first shows I watched that took fairly serious issues (like gangs for example) and dealt with them in a thoughtful non-exploitative manner despite having the surface appearance of a situation comedy.
 
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Jimmy Walker wasn’t an actor but a stand up comic, so I think that contributed to why they gave him a lot of catch phrases.

I recently learned that the actor who played the first Lionel, Mike Evans, was a creator / writer of Good Times. Norman Lear fired him from the Jeffersons.
 
When I mentioned this to friends from Latin American countries they tell me it’s true across the board.
 
Peeps said:
But I also recognize that Norman Lear’s programs were the beginning of the end of “wholesome” family-friendly TV, where a Mom and a Dad were happily married and raising lively but obedient children, and all were glad to be Americans and no one swore or had sex outside of marriage (which is the norm now on almost all TV shows) or campaigned for legalizing evil acts.

And Norman Lear’s programs often proclaimed evil to be “good” and misled many Americans into relativism; e.g., the abortion episode of “Maude.” Maude also glorified the idea of the “spineless, impotent” husband and the strong but oppressed wife being held back from accomplishing her real ambitions. A lot of us drank that KoolAid, too. Nothing wrong with a woman having dreams, goals, and ambitions, but when men are denigrated in the process, and marriage is lowered on the list of priorities, the family suffers, and the entire fabric of society is weakened and eventually rips.
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Norman Lear’s shows were, in the main, liberal, progressivist propaganda and morality plays. But they were very well-done, thoughtful, and contained strong main characters. It is very worthwhile television if one keeps those caveats in mind.
 
tomarin said:
When I mentioned this to friends from Latin American countries they tell me it’s true across the board.
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Met a couple from Uruguay. Apparently if you are from Uruguay, you’re not only proud of being “pure Spanish” you’re proud of your Spanish language usage too because it’s “pure Castilian” or so they said.
 
Ridgerunner said:
Met a couple from Uruguay. Apparently if you are from Uruguay, you’re not only proud of being “pure Spanish” you’re proud of your Spanish language usage too because it’s “pure Castilian” or so they said.
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I hear that a lot from a lot of different places.
 
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Didn’t John Amos leave the show eventually? I can’t exactly remember how they wrote him out. Anyone?
 
Irishmom2 said:
Didn’t John Amos leave the show eventually? I can’t exactly remember how they wrote him out. Anyone?
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He died of a heart attack (the character, not the actor), in a surprise ending - not sure whether he appeared in that episode; in other words, I think the death occurred off screen.
 
I don’t consider propaganda to be entertainment. It was a deliberately dysfunctional show. As Mr. Lear’s soapbox, a complete waste of time.
 
The original All In The Family and The Jeffersons were entertaining and thought-provoking. They were on during a period of great divide in this country, the 1960s and 1970s.
A lot of the issues these two programs addressed were some of the issues that divide our country today.
There is no Vietnam, but our country is involved in conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and other places around the globe.
Civil unrest, abortion, and other issues still are with us.
These two programs offered an opportunity for these issues to be addressed through the Bunkers and the Jeffersons.
As polarized as our country is today, I am not sure if either program would be able to survive on television today.
 
0Scarlett_nidiyilii said:
I’m not sure if Norman Lear was fighting against conservatives or racists.

In those days, casual racism was more along age lines than political party lines. I still see it with my elderly patients, and they’re both Democrat and Republican.
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Having rewatched a number of episodes from the original series a couple of years ago, I observe that in the first season, Archie Bunker was a bit of a caricature, a set up for Michael and other “noble” baby boomers in the show to make the brunt of jokes.

What I appreciated was the nuance that was added to all the characters, but in particular Edith and Michael. Edith proved wiser than the first few shows, and certainly had a strong moral compass, and defended strongly her choice of being a wife and mother when Gloria and Michael would, one way or the other, put her down.

At the same time, Michael was shown, in his own way, to be every bit as prejudiced, belligerent as Archie. I think the latter is very important, and showed that while there’s no doubt Lear is as liberal as they come, he and his writers understood quite well that the baby boomers were not paragons of virtue, and they were invested in their own prejudices just as much as Archie’s generation.

I’d skip much of the first season. I think the show was just getting its bearings. It’s in the second season onward that the actors began inhabiting their roles, and Lear and the writers became more expansive in their view of the main characters. Archie wasn’t just an ignorant loud mouthed bigot, Edith wasn’t an idiot, and Michael and Gloria were not paragons of liberal intelligentsia virtue (the episode were Michael belts a guy on the subway is absolutely precious).
 
Really, All In The Family was hardly the first show to grapple with tough social issues. The Twilight Zone, Star Trek and a number of other shows had done so throughout the 1960s. The difference was in the 1960s, social commentary had to be masked. You couldn’t talk about racism out right, but you could use two characters with opposite colored face paint to make the point. Lear was able to tackle these issues head on.
 
I also think the distal cause of his being written off the show had to do with some kind of disagreement behind the scenes between the actor and the showrunner about the direction of the show or something like that, but I don’t recall the details. I only learned about it years later (of course being a kid I didn’t think about or wasn’t curious about why a character would be written off a show; I just accepted it as part of the narrative arc of the show).
 
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niceatheist said:
Really, All In The Family was hardly the first show to grapple with tough social issues. The Twilight Zone, Star Trek and a number of other shows had done so throughout the 1960s. The difference was in the 1960s, social commentary had to be masked. You couldn’t talk about racism out right, but you could use two characters with opposite colored face paint to make the point. Lear was able to tackle these issues head on.
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Or put them in outer space in the far-flung future.
 
The original All in the Family should never be viewed as history or as a documentary. Those who wish to paint all ‘baby boomers’ with a broad brush are showing their prejudice. It is also an attempt to paint all baby boomers as ‘under that fake exterior is a bad man.’ Yeah, they were all bad and liked to roll in the mud.

Please don’t try to sell that here.
 
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