Word: connore
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...Greatest Generation experience; their sexual openness shocked his values; and - most shocking to him and to viewers - their emphasis on civil rights opened the floodgates to minorities and rival ethnic groups, whom he called "spades" and "wops" and "Hebes" and so on without flinching. The flinching, O'Connor left up to us; he never acted to make us love or hate Archie, he said, but just to convey the truth of him as best he could...
...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...
...Connor's performance remade that most stable of archetypes, the TV Dad. He prefigured Homer Simpson and Al Bundy; he took Ralph Kramden out of the realm of buffoonery and carried him to his logical extreme; he took the omniscient, benevolent TV dad of the '50s and exploded that figure as 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...
...left-wing knock against "All in the Family," and more specifically against O'Connor's performance, was that 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...
...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...