Word: bunkerisms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...taboos will be toppling. Marcus Welby last week joined the abortion debate with a patient who had not one but two in a single year. An upcoming ABC "Movie of the Week" will feature Hal Holbrook explaining his homosexuality to his son. Just for laughs, Archie Bunker's daughter will be the victim of an attempted rape...
...Family" was really a years-long territorial war fought in the home (it's no accident the character's name was "Bunker"). O'Connor played Archie like a shambling, endangered silverback gorilla prowling and growling futilely around the carpeted perimeter of his living room. The values he developed through the depression and a war were fraying and decaying like his upholstered TV-watching throne. (The prominence of his other throne - the upstairs toilet whose on-air flushing was so shocking three decades ago - underscored the theme of Archie as an Astoria King Lear...
...irrevocably as a gunpowder-stuffed tobacco pipe. Sure, this was a slap in the face of conservatives, who chafed at the show's Norman Lear liberalism. But the O'Connor's genius was that he played the part well enough to discomfit ideologues on the left too. Archie Bunker proved that satire is TV's most dangerous genre, because it cannot be controlled - it requires interpretation, which is anathema to true believers...
...people might enjoy it for the wrong reasons: bigots could use his most troglodytic insults, or sexists could call their wives "dingbats," and claim they were just quoting Archie. Worse, they argued, he made his working-class antihero empathetic and therefore, they argued, made his beliefs attractive. Wrong. Archie Bunker spoke to a whole country engaged in a second American civil war, fighting bitterly in their own living rooms with people they loved nonetheless. If he was too unreconstructed to admire, he was too real to dismiss: if you could not see yourself, or at least someone you loved...
...making us feel for Archie Bunker, Carroll O'Connor made us think about Archie Bunker. It was a job he did so well it dogged the rest of his career (even though he went on to win another Emmy as a southern police chief in "In the Heat of the Night"), so well that it seemed easy, obvious and to some, dangerous. And that, my friends, is what you call acting...