Archie Bunker
Archie Bunker was a fictional character in the long-running and top-rated American television sitcom All in the Family. He was a reactionary, bigoted, blue-collar worker and family man, played to acclaim by Carroll O'Connor. The Bunker character was first seen by the American public when All in the Family premiered in January 1971. In 1979 the show was retooled and renamed Archie Bunker’s Place, finally going off the air in 1983. Bunker lived in the borough of Queens in New York City— many sources say in the Corona neighborhood, although that neighborhood was never referenced on All in the Family itself. TV Guide once named Archie television's greatest character of all time.
All in the Family got many of its laughs by playing on Archie's bigotry, although the dynamic tension between Archie and his left wing son-in-law Michael "Meathead" Stivic (Rob Reiner) provided an ongoing political and social sounding board for a variety of topics. Other family members included wife Edith (Jean Stapleton), daughter Gloria (Sally Struthers) and, after late 1975, grandson Joey Stivic.
In spite of his numerous flaws, Archie was simultaneously portrayed as being basically decent and, rather than possessing genuine malice, a product of the time in which he was raised. In the episode "Archie and the KKK," for example, Archie is invited to join a secret "Christian" club which turns out to be a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. In spite of his inherent discomfort around people of color, Archie responds with genuine revulsion at the group's violent methods, and attempts to thwart a cross burning.
Viewer reactions
Such was the name recognition and societal influence of the Bunker character that by 1972 commentators were discussing the "Archie Bunker vote" (i.e., the voting bloc comprised of urban, white, working-class men) in that year's presidential election; in the same year, there was a not insignificant parody election campaign, complete with T-shirts and bumper stickers, advocating "Archie Bunker for President." The term "Archie Bunker-ism," or just "Archie-ism," was also coined during the show's run to refer to the many malapropisms that Bunker used on the series.
Archie's opposition to the Klan in the episode mentioned above upset several watchdog groups, who believed that the show shouldn't have "humanized" what they viewed was a racist and believed that Archie should be kept thoroughly unlikable.
Trivia
- The inspiration for Archie Bunker was Alf Garnett, the character from the BBC sitcom Til Death Us Do Part, on which All in the Family was based.
- Archie's wife Edith died in 1980, at the beginning of the second season of Archie Bunker's Place.
- Archie's racism had subsided by the time Archie Bunker's Place began. During its second season, he hired a black nanny for Stephanie, Ellen Canby, and became fond of her. In one episode, Archie punched a man for making a remark about her and was thrown out for good from the lodge he had attended since the early days of All in the Family, the Kings Of Queens.