All in the Family

Created by Norman Lear and based loosely on the British sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, All in the Family was the clearest example of what would soon be known as “relevance TV.” It took as its subject matter issues that were pertinent to American life in the 1970s, featuring stories about agnosticism, rape, radical politics, racism, impotence, and a host of other previously forbidden topics. Although the show featured a typical sitcom setting (a living room), everything looked and sounded different. Shot on videotape, the show had a visual immediacy unprecedented in television sitcoms. Its characters were loud and sometimes brash, and the language used was often profane, racist, or otherwise offensive. For the first time in TV series history, an onscreen warning preceded the broadcast, preparing viewers for the controversial nature of the program to follow.

Like so many television sitcoms, All in the Family focused on the domestic life of an American family. Unlike the idealized sitcom families of the 1950s and ’60s—those of Leave It to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show (ABC, 1958–66), and Father Knows Best, for example—the Bunkers fought the cultural and generational battles typical of the era in the living room of their Queens, N.Y., bungalow. Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O’Connor), the middle-aged blue-collar head of the household, is a bigot who longs for the days of Herbert Hoover and resents the changing attitudes of his country and the changing racial profile of his neighbourhood. He leads a reasonably stable life working as a dock foreman, fending off the counterculture, and supporting his daffy but principled stay-at-home wife, Edith (played by Jean Stapleton), and his modern but docile daughter, Gloria (played by Sally Struthers). After Gloria marries Michael Stivic (played by Rob Reiner), a long-haired, liberal-minded graduate student whose lack of income forces him to live under Archie’s roof, the comic fighting between Archie and his son-in-law mirrors the complex social, political, and cultural debates that were raging in the United States at the time.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Although All in the Family, introduced in January of the 1970–71 season, was the most notorious and controversial of CBS’s new relevance programming, it was not the first. Back in September of that same season, The Mary Tyler Moore Show made a much quieter debut. It presented an ensemble of believable characters behaving in ways that seemed fairly normal to the average viewer. Whereas All in the Family often discussed the women’s movement, The Mary Tyler Moore Show showed it as lived by one American woman, Mary Richards (played by Mary Tyler Moore), a single woman in her 30s who works in the newsroom of a Minneapolis, Minn., television station. Unlike the single career woman in That Girl, an old-style comedy that ran contemporaneously with The Mary Tyler Moore Show for a season, Mary Richards had no steady boyfriend and no omnipresent father, and she subtly revealed in one episode that she took birth-control pills.

The creators of the show had to work within limitations. As originally conceived, Mary Richards was a divorced woman, and, had she ultimately been presented as such, she would have broken new ground as the principal character of a television series. Many television historians cite an unnamed CBS executive who allegedly claimed that the American public would never accept a series with a lead character who was divorced, was from New York, was Jewish, or had a mustache. Whether this industry legend is true or not, CBS did insist that Mary be reconceived as a single woman recovering from the breakup of a long-standing relationship. Things changed rapidly after that, however. Four years later, CBS introduced Rhoda (1974–78), a spinoff of The Mary Tyler Moore Show that featured Valerie Harper as a Jewish New Yorker who divorces her husband during the run of the series. Then, in 1975, Norman Lear’s One Day at a Time (1975–84), the first successful series about a divorced woman, became a hit for CBS.