As Archie Bunker’s foil, Rob Reiner brought politics home
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
By JAMES PONIEWOZIK
Before red and blue America, before MAGA and the resistance, before our current blue-collar and white-collar political sorting, there was Archie Bunker and Michael Stivic.
“All in the Family,” which stormed onto American TV sets in 1971, was a showcase for Carroll O’Connor as the blustering, bigoted Archie. But it takes two to have an argument. And as Michael, Rob Reiner, who died on Sunday at age 78, was an indispensable sparring partner, the flint off whom Archie’s bludgeoning struck sparks.
Created by Norman Lear, “All in the Family” took the political wars going on in America’s streets and brought them into the living room. Specifically, it plopped us at 704 Hauser St. in the Queens borough of New York City, where the paleoconservative loading dock worker Archie and his wife, Edith (Jean Stapleton), shared a roof with their daughter, Gloria (Sally Struthers), and her husband, Michael, the liberal sociology student whom Archie pithily nicknamed “Meathead.” (Lear borrowed the epithet from his own father, who called him that when they argued.)
For Archie, Michael was not just a handy foil — the righteous, longhaired interloper whom Archie resented for winning over his daughter and eating his food. He was the personification of a moment of history.
The war in Vietnam — which Michael and Archie argued about the first time they met — saw the beginnings of the breakup of the New Deal Democratic coalition. In the “Hard Hat Riot” of 1970, blue-collar workers like Archie pummeled student anti-war demonstrators in lower Manhattan. This echo made “All in the Family” a comedy of its moment, but it also anticipated our own, when educational polarization is one of the biggest dynamics shaping politics.
Archie personified the “Love it or leave it” spirit of the hard hats. But Michael’s presence made the fight personal. Like America’s factions, the two of them were deeply entangled; they had to share space, attention and, contentiously, the bathroom. Their situation was ours. They didn’t love it, but they couldn’t leave it.
Michael was often the straight man to Archie, upbraiding his prejudices (including against Polish Americans like Michael himself) and checking his facts. Being right can be a curse upon comedy, and Archie got the bulk of the punchlines.
But Reiner’s pugnacious performance helped give the show its live-theater energy. And as Reiner demonstrated over his nearly eight years on the show, he could play the clown when called on. He did a mean Groucho Marx, and he often showed a gift for physical comedy, as when Michael was forced to share a bedroom with Archie, shimmying eel-like into a tiny cot. He was a hot, looming presence, punctuating his speeches with flailing arm gestures, but he could dial the performance down, countering Archie’s rants with a blinking deadpan.
Reiner, of course, had a leg up on the job, coming from a showbiz family; his father, Carl Reiner, created “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” and his mother, Estelle, was an actress and singer. He quickly made his own reputation, however, winning two Emmys in the role, for best supporting actor.
Like much about “All in the Family,” Michael’s character cut two ways. He was the voice of enlightened reason and modern open-mindedness. But his longtime unemployment also made him an easy target for Archie, as well as Archie-sympathizing viewers who liked the caricature of a freeloading bleeding heart.
Michael’s flaws — he could also be a self-serious blowhard and a bit chauvinistic — made him human and interesting. Interesting is funny, and funny was the packaging in which “All in the Family” delivered its intimate take on the news to the CBS prime-time audience.
No disrespect to Edith or Gloria, but Archie and Michael’s relationship may have been the most important in the series. “All in the Family” was a machine that ran on anger, and the two of them together were a fission reactor. They never really achieved peace, but they were more alike than they liked to admit in their strident need to have the last word. And every now and then, they achieved a truce, as when Archie told Michael about the rough Depression upbringing that shaped him.
In the real world, the same sort of battles were breaking up families for good. On Hauser Street, the Bunkers and Stivics kept together for better or worse — at least, until the Stivics moved to California and Reiner finally left the regular cast. The series wasn’t the same without this core conflict; it meandered on for another season and eventually became the diminished “Archie Bunker’s Place.”
As for Reiner, who went on to have a phenomenal run as a movie director, his comic performance as a sitcom liberal foreshadowed his eventual reputation as one of Hollywood’s most prominent progressive advocates. Still, Reiner recognized how defining the role was. “I could win the Nobel Prize,” he told The New York Times in 2006, “and the headline would read, ‘Meathead Wins Nobel.’”
Rob Reiner was no Meathead, and he added plenty of accomplishments to his filmography. Yet the role may have been his greatest political statement. Week after week, he gave America a liberal who could push back and stand up for himself, who could take and deliver a joke. If we are stuck in this national family argument, he showed us, we could at least laugh about it.