While All in the Family is today considered to be a "groundbreaking" show in the history of television by the liberal media, it is a glaring reminder of Hollywood's unsuccessful attempt to demonize conservatives beginning in the early 1970s. Despite the promotion of liberal values by All in the Family, however, the Politically Incorrect Guide to the 1960s mentioned that audiences looked up to Archie Bunker largely because of his stubborn rejection of the counterculture, and his chair was even included as one of the most famous exhibits in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
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audiences looked up to Archie Bunker largely because of his stubborn rejection of the counterculture
From https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MisaimedFandom/LiveActionTV
Archie Bunker of All in the Family often got flak for this. The character's bigotry was used to demonstrate why prejudice is bad; unfortunately, the people who needed to learn this most often missed the point and saw Archie as a "telling it like it is" hero.
Some of this stemmed from the fact that the writers weren't eager to court controversy by making their main character genuinely bigoted — and so Archie was written, and brilliantly played by Carroll O'Connor, as stubborn and ignorant instead of vicious and hateful.
All In The Family made fun of Archie, but many peole didn’t realize it. It also made fun of Meathead, because extremism in any direction was a bad thing, in Lear’s eyes.
But all the above article is saying is that a lot of people identified with an ignorant blue collar bigot.
I always enjoyed how they humanized Archie over the years. When he went to his friend’s funeral and found out the guy who’d been telling all those Jewish jokes was, in fact, Jewish…
Touched the coffin and said, ‘Shalom, my friend.”
First season Archie would have said, “better one of them than one of us.”
That’s the episode my grandfather stopped watching the show. “They ruined a perfectly good character.”
I remember the episode when Edith explained to Mike how Archie had to go to work at a young age to support his mom and sisters, and so missed the opportunities that Mike had to better himself. A lot of Archie's hostility towards Mike was simply jealousy.
That scene helped reframe Archie's character as human rather than just nasty, and as someone the audience could identify with rather than just condemn.
All in the Family
Archie Bunker
…both based on the previous 1960 s BBC sitcom “Till Death Us Do Part” with the equally bigoted character Alf Garnett.
Newsflash, Conservapoodia: The latter was played by Warren Mitchell, who was Jewish .
History being an alien concept to ye, o Andy Schaftafly & co: along with Irony.
You should be glad there wasn’t an ‘Americanised’ version of the sequel series “In Sickness and in Health”: featuring the character - who is the council-employed carer of Alf - Winston, a.k.a. ‘Marigold’.
Who is a black gay man.
…oh, and this was way before the concept of ‘Woke’: as that sequel was made by the BBC from 1985-1992.
The “The Politically Incorrect Guide” book series is little more than exercises in far-right (I’d say alt-right but they predate that movement) claptrap and propaganda. The first one I’d ever heard of was “…to Darwinism and Intelligent Design”, and they haven’t gotten any better. Using them as a source is one step above using True Capitalist Radio.
To evaluate what "liberal media" means in this context, one must remember that Conservapedia is this ultrafundamentalist project rejecting knowledge and reality to a point where it also involves the rejection of mainstream Christianity. Even the Bible is "too liberal" and needs to be doctored. And reliable knowledge sources must be discarded, including using straw men like "liberal media". This particular description is not intended to be saty i rical, it's really that extreme. Oftentimes, when reading text on Conservapedia, it is difficult to distinguish it from satire and that fact has also been exploited by vandals who felt the irresistible urge to mock it. It's unclear what remains of the trolling material after being cleaned up by the few regulars, who have a hard time to distinguish it themselves. It likely results in a vicious circle to an increasingly deeper rabbit hole.
Edit: genuine funny typo fixed :)
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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