How long did all in the family run

CBS had the biggest audiences, but ABC and NBC were successfully wooing advertisers with their arguments that they had better audiences: young, affluent consumers in urban centers. Wood had not been elevated to the presidency with a mission to transform the network. He arrived with no announced mandate or vision; nor did he hope to leave his mark on the culture. Michael Ovitz, then a young agent, recalled that no one in the creative community looked to Wood for insight. The radical-right Irish conservative.

But the advertising department found Wood receptive to its arguments for a new direction. One day in February , Wood came to the sales department and said that CBS had to get younger in its programming and its audience.

Privately, he told CBS executives that he feared losing the younger generation to the edgy new movies emerging from Hollywood, like Easy Rider. Norman Lear, during the first two decades of his show-business career, had displayed neither much interest nor much facility in generating conversation, but Lear would provide Wood exactly what he was looking for, and then some. A ll in the Family began as a British television show titled Till Death Us Do Part , the story of a working-class bigot, his sharp-tongued wife, their daughter, and her husband.

It caused a sensation in Britain for its frank treatment of racism and other previously taboo topics, and its potential as a template for an American show seemed obvious. The material had instantly detonated with Lear: The battles between the bigoted father and the liberal son-in-law reminded him of his own struggles with his father, Herman.

In late summer , he acquired the rights to the project and secured a contract from ABC to develop a pilot. Lear did not begin adapting Till Death with any ambition to transform television. Lear moved quickly to write, cast, and film a pilot for the show, which he initially called Justice for All.

He relocated the setting from London to Queens. Lear cast two lesser-known younger actors as Mike and Gloria, and shot a pilot in late September ABC, however, rejected it—as well as a second, redo pilot he shot a year later.

Wood was initially hesitant, but soon recognized that he had found his conversation starter. William Paley, the autocratic chairman of the board, hated it from the outset, considering it vulgar. But Wood was determined. With the go-ahead from CBS, Lear reshaped the cast with new choices for the younger roles. For the director, Lear chose John Rich, a skilled television veteran whom he had met two decades earlier.

Yes, Wood had bought the show, but he remained skittish about it. Wood and CBS were simply uncertain that a show this different from their usual programming would find an audience. Read: The paranoid style in American entertainment. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to show—in a mature fashion—just how absurd they are. Lear wanted to start with the third version of the pilot, which he had taped with the new cast. Viewed even decades later, the episode is explosive.

Summoning painful memories, viscerally connected to his characters, Lear, then in his mids, found in his script a passionate and urgent voice he had never before tapped. Mike, just as heatedly, is blaming crime on poverty and insisting that he and Gloria see no evidence that God exists.

Near the end of the season, Mike gets a teaching job in California and he and Gloria move away with baby Joey. To fill their empty nest, Archie and Edith take in her nine-year-old grand-niece Stephanie Danielle Brisebois. But Edith did not. Brisebois and Melvin remained with the new show and Stapleton appeared in a handful of episodes until Edith dies off-camera from a stroke.

All In The Family begat seven spin-offs, directly or indirectly. Next was the short-lived Gloria in , with Struthers raising Joey after divorcing Mike. And finally, Hauser brought us back to the Bunker house with a new family living there in For airdates and times, visit the All In The Family show page. Skip to main content.

When Mike finally finishes graduate school and the Stivics move out, it turns out to be to the house next door. The house was offered to them by George Jefferson , the Bunkers' former neighbor, who knows it will irritate Archie. In addition to calling him " Meathead ", Archie also frequently cites Mike's Polish ancestry, referring to him as a "dumb Polack ". The show is set in the Astoria section of Queens , one of New York City's five boroughs, with the vast majority of scenes taking place in the Bunkers' home and later, frequently, the Stivics' home.

Occasional scenes take place in other locations, most often especially during later seasons Kelcy's Bar, a neighborhood tavern where Archie spends a good deal of time and which he eventually buys. Lear bought the rights to Till Death Us Do Part and incorporated his own family experiences with his father into the show.

Lear's father would tell Lear's mother to "stifle herself" and she would tell Lear's father "you are the laziest white man I ever saw" two "Archieisms" that found their way onto the show. Three different pilots were shot for the series. Different actors played the roles of Mike, Gloria, and Lionel in the first two. Lear initially wanted to shoot in black and white.

While CBS insisted on color, Lear had the set furnished in rather neutral tones, keeping everything relatively devoid of color. As wardrobe designer Rita Riggs described in her Archives of American Television interview, Lear's idea was to create the feeling of sepia tones, in an attempt to make viewers feel as if they were looking at an old family album. All In The Family was the first major American series to be videotaped in front of a live studio audience. In the s, most sitcoms had been filmed in the single-camera format without audiences, with a laugh track simulating audience response.

Lear employed the Multi-camera format of shooting in front of an audience, but used tape, whereas previous multi-camera shows like Mary Tyler Moore had used film. Thanks to the success of All in the Family , videotaping sitcoms in front of an audience became common format for the genre during the s. The use of videotape also gave All in the Family the look and feel of early live television, including the original live broadcasts of The Honeymooners , to which All in the Family is sometimes compared.

For the show's final season, the practice of being taped before a live audience changed to playing the already taped and edited show to an audience and recording their laughter to add to the original sound track. Thus, the voice-over during the end credits was changed from Rob Reiner's " All in the Family was recorded on tape before a live audience" to Carroll O'Connor's " All in the Family was played to a studio audience for live responses". Typically, the audience would be gathered for a taping of One Day at a Time and get to see All in the Family as a bonus.

Throughout its run, Norman Lear took pride in the fact that canned laughter was never used mentioning this on many occasions - the audience laughter heard in the episodes was genuine. The series' opening theme song "Those Were the Days", [10] written by Lee Adams lyrics and Charles Strouse music , was presented in a unique way for a s series: Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton seated at a console or spinet piano played by Stapleton and singing the tune on-camera at the start of every episode, concluding with live-audience applause.

The song dates back to the very first Justice for All pilot, although on that occasion O'Connor and Stapleton performed the song off-camera and at a faster tempo than the series version. Several different performances were recorded over the run of the series, including one version that includes additional lyrics. The song is a simple, pentatonic melody that can be played exclusively with black keys on a piano in which Archie and Edith wax nostalgic for the simpler days of yesteryear.

A longer version of the song was released as a single on Atlantic Records , reaching No. A few perceptible drifts can be observed when listening to each version chronologically: In the original version, Jean Stapleton was wearing glasses, and after the first time the lyric "those were the days" was sung over the tonic root chord of the song's key the piano strikes a Dominant 7th chord in transition to the next part, which is absent from subsequent versions; Jean Stapleton's screeching high note on the line "And you knew who you WEEERRE then" became louder, longer, and more comical, although it was only in the original version that audience laughter was heard in response to her rendition of the note; Carroll O'Connor's pronunciation of "welfare state" gained more of Archie's trademark enunciation, and the closing lyrics especially "Gee, our old LaSalle ran great" were sung with increasingly deliberate articulation, as viewers had initially complained that they could not understand the words.

Also in the original version: the camera angle was shot slightly from the right side of the talent as opposed to the straight on angle of the next version. Lear and his writers set the series in the Queens neighborhood of Astoria. The address of the Bunkers' house at Hauser Street was completely fictitious no Hauser Street exists in Queens and factually incorrect with the way address numbers are assigned in Queens they are all hyphenated, beginning with a block number representing the nearest preceding cross-street, keeping in line with Queens' predominantly numerical street-naming system.

Many real-life Queens institutions are mentioned throughout the series. For example it is revealed that Archie attended Flushing High School, a real high school located in Flushing, Queens although in the " Man Of The Year" episode of ''Archie Bunker's Place'', it is revealed that Archie attended Bryant High School in Long Island City, graduating in , while Edith mentioned several times throughout the series that she shops at Gertz Department store, a then-existing department store located in Jamaica and Flushing, Queens.

Additionally, the episode " The Baby Contest " deals with Archie entering baby Joey in a "cutest baby" contest sponsored by the Flushing Tribune , a then-operating local newspaper now known as the Queens Tribune. At different times throughout the series, the telephone exchanges Ravenswood RA and Bayside BA were used for the Bunkers' telephone number.

Both exchanges were, and still are, applicable names for phone numbers in the neighborhoods of Astoria and Bayside. This may have had to do with the fact that at the time many major cities in the United States, such as New York, were resisting the dropping of telephone exchange names in favor of all-number dialing, and were still printing their telephone books with exchange names. This fact is referred to in the episode "The Appendectomy", when Edith, while dialing a telephone number, uses the Parkview exchange name only to correct herself by saying that she keeps forgetting that it's all number dialing now.

However, she comes to the conclusion that the number is exactly the same either way. Main article: List of All in the Family episodes. Guest star Sammy Davis, Jr. Davis leaves a briefcase behind in Archie's taxi Archie is moonlighting as a cab driver and goes to the Bunker home to pick it up. After hearing Archie's racist remarks, Davis asks for a photograph with him.