Archie Bunker's America TV in an Era of Change, 1968–1978 Josh Ozersky Foreword by Mark Crispin Miller   April 2003 cloth, 0-8093-2507-1, $45.00 240 pages, 6 x 9, 13 illus. Media Studies / Communication   Read excerpts   “Josh Ozersky’s study is important both for the new light it sheds on an extraordinary moment in the history of TV and for its illumination also of the moment when, arguably, the current phase of U.S. cultural history began. For TV’s postapocalyptic move to depoliticize the spirit of the Sixties marked the onset of the culture of TV that floods our consciousness today.” —Mark Crispin Miller, from the Foreword      Archie Bunker’s America discerns what was “in the air” as television networks tried to accommodate cultural and political swings in America from the Vietnam era through the late 1970s. Josh Ozersky’s spirited examination of the ways America changed television during a period of intense social upheaval, recuperation, and fragmentation uncovers a bold and beguiling facet of American cultural history. From the conflict-based comedy of All in the Family and such post-sixties frolics as Three’s Company to tendentiously apolitical programs like Happy Days, Ozersky describes the range and power of television to echo larger schemes of American life.   Around 1968, advertisers who were anxious to break into the lucrative baby-boomer demographic convinced television networks to begin to abandon prime-time programming that catered to universal audiences. With the market splintering, networks ventured into more issue-based and controversial territories. While early network attempts at more “relevant” programming failed, Ozersky examines how CBS struck gold with the political comedy All in the Family in 1971 and how other successful, conflict-based comedies turned away from typical show business conventions. As the 1970s wore on, the innovations of the previous years began to lose their public appeal. After Vietnam and Watergate, Ozersky argues, Americans were exhausted from the political turbulence of the preceding decade and were ready for a televisual “return to normalcy.”   Straightforward, engaging, and liberally illustrated, Archie Bunker’s America is peppered with the stories of outsider cops and failed variety shows, of a young Bill Murray and an old Ed Sullivan, of Mary Tyler Moore, Fonzie, and the Skipper, too. Drawing on interviews with television insiders, trade publications, and the programs themselves, Ozersky chronicles the ongoing attempts of prime-time television to program for a fragmented audience—an audience whose greatest common denominator, by 1978, may well have been the act of watching television itself. The book also includes a foreword by renowned media critic Mark Crispin Miller and an epilogue of related commentary on the following decades.   Josh Ozersky writes frequently on American cultural history for Newsday, the Washington Post, History: Review of New Books, Tikkun, Business 2.0, and other periodicals. He is the author of Readings for the 21st Century and has contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of American Biography.       Excerpts from Archie Bunker's America:    On TV programming, circa 1968 . . . “The Neilsen top ten of 1968 thus consisted of three pastoral comedies, two westerns, a liver-spotted handful of aging star vehicles, and a pair of ludicrous sitcoms—one about two cute children in the care of an English valet, and the other about a housewife with magic powers. The proverbial viewer from outer space, receiving these broadcasts a billion years hence in his recliner in the Crab Nebula, would infer from them only the most ephemeral of social problems.”   On Bill Murray . . . “Bill Murray was a master of the poker-faced, knowing expression—the guy who never really meant what he said, and around whose every utterance invisible quotation marks hovered.  Murray took this part even farther than Chase had, and in the process created a cultural style which has yet to be eradicated from our culture. Whenever a David Letterman pointedly mouths a trite, empty phrase  (‘from the home office in Scottsdale, Arizona’); whenever some sitcom rebel in dark sunglasses assures a traffic court judge or detention monitor that ‘I truly regret what I’ve done’;  whenever two people in conversation fall into what author Douglas Coupland called ‘telethonese’—unctuous phrases like ‘you’re beautiful,’ ‘I love this guy,’  ‘what a nut,’ etc.—Bill Murray’s wings beat overhead.”   On Archie Bunker . . . “Archie Bunker is a creature of the past, lingering into the present as an unquiet spirit, a ghost of the era that created him.  Norman Lear knows that.  You and I, the audience, know it. Mike and Gloria know it. Even Edith, for all of her servility, knows it. The only one who doesn’t know it is Archie, and it is this very indomitability that elevates him above traditional TV heavies and bigots.  They ‘learn their lesson’ at the end of every episode. That Archie never learns his lesson is the source of his great iconic power. He was the Sisyphus of the hardhats, constantly attempting to roll Meathead, Gloria, Edith, Norman Lear, his neighbors, the scriptwriters, and the political climate of the sixties generally back up the hill of vanished time.”   On the TV superhero . . . “The 70s superhero was young, laid-back, and frisky, and tended to eschew violence—another aftereffect of the Family Hour. The Incredible Hulk, for example, was a sensitive, thoughtful scientist wandering from town to town and helping people help themselves—until they got in too tight a spot for self-esteem to rescue them; then he would turn into a green-skinned monster, also sensitive, who would throw his opponents harmlessly into barrels or stacked cans of soup.”   On Three’s Company . . . “Sociologically speaking, Mr. and Mrs. Roper are the most interesting thing on television during this period. For one thing, the Ropers are meant to stand for all of the worst characteristics of pre-sixties, unliberated America. Mr. Roper is a dirty-minded  prude. Predictably, he is impotent, a fact which accounts for nearly all of Mrs. Roper’s lines (‘You’re not in a rising market.’  ‘Neither are you.’). Mrs. Roper is more sympathetic; she knows Jack’s secret, and, although unable to enjoy the salvation of Charles Reich’s America, with its new freedom and honesty, she is not so benighted as to begrudge it to the younger generation.”   On Kung Fu  . . . “Kwai Chang Caine solves everybody’s problems, much as all wandering western heroes do, but he is clearly too good for the land he is in.  These are the kind of people that would set fire to huts, and do.  Kung Fu summed up in one gratifying package American self-loathing, the sixties’ infatuation with the orient, and the characteristically American desire to have the best of both worlds: Caine is a pacifist as pure as Gandhi or Daniel Berrigan, but he can kick anybody’s ass, and does.”