Word: bunkerisms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Lear has the sort of temperament that might be described by Archie Bunker as "hebe Hollywood egghead"-or, if Archie knew the word, compulsive. The only eye in the hurricane of activity that he whips up around him each day is the moment when he retires to the men's room for a thorough perusal of the New York Times. One of his two outside interests is writing letters to Presidents and other political leaders on such topics as Viet Nam, the ICBM debate and school desegregation. His voluminous correspondence with four Administrations is filed in a cabinet...
...enjoys relaxing with a wide circle of friends. He and his wife-former Actress Peggy Diem, by whom he has a son and a daughter-shuttle between a Spanish-style home in Beverly Hills and a rented beach house at Malibu, where Yorkin occasionally dons an Archie Bunker sweatshirt and barbecues hot dogs for neighbors like the Henry Mancinis. Although, like Lear, he describes himself as a putative liberal, he sometimes turns up for dinner with Henry Kissinger when the presidential adviser makes one of his forays into Hollywood salons...
...both, because it all goes in the same pot." The pot is growing bigger; what to do next is becoming a multimillion-dollar question. Indeed, what else is left for Yorkin and Lear now that they have given TV a new system of dating-B.B. and A.B. (Before Bunker and After Bunker)? How much longer can they compete with themselves for the top audience ratings...
Among the first through that new door for the coming season were-once again-Yorkin and Lear. This time they have a spin-off from Family called Maude, and already it ranks as one of the fall's top prospects. Maude is Edith Bunker's cousin who lives somewhere in upstate New York. As played by the formidable (5 ft. 9 in.), husky-contral-toed Beatrice Arthur, she may do for liberal suburban matrons what Archie has done for urban hardhats...
...first hove into view on a Family episode last season. The entire Bunker family fell ill and Maude took over the household-especially Archie ("You can either get up off that couch and eat your breakfast or lie there and feed off your own fat...and if you choose the latter you can probably lie there for months"). The CBS brass was watching and, in Norman Lear's words, "saw a star." A second episode-in effect a pilot -was concocted, in which Archie and Edith visited Maude on the eve of her daughter's wedding...