Lately I’ve been spending way too much time flipping through Meta’s primary offerings to kill time. A friend and I send each other links to reels and posts on a wide variety of topics from political to plain funny. This morning he sent me a clip from the 70s sitcom “All In the Family”. You know the show whose claim to fame was the first toilet flush broadcast nationally (or anywhere) on the old tube (quite literally).

For the younger ones, TVs was not a series of OLED points of light but instead a cathode ray tube. Electrons were fired from ray guns – red, green, and blue for colour TVs that were distributed across a phosphor coated screen. The cathode ray tube was the primary reason old TVs were so deep and weighed a ton.
For more info visit How Television Works | HowStuffWorks.

Anyway, back to Archie, Edith, and the family. Here is the clip my friend this morning with Archie and Meathead debating why cave women had short legs and fat butts…

As I watched, it donned on me that this show, a cultural juggernaut in its time would never have aired in 2023. Ironic because the entire point was to expose the social issues of the day. The same issues that still plague society today. You could argue that many of the movement exist or thrived because of “All In the Family”, its spin-off show “The Jeffersons” and other shows that followed a similar path.

All In the Family was one of the watershed moments in Western pop culture. It brought many of the issue of race, sex and inequality into the public consciousness. The show was a bold statement in its time that represented two steps forward in our social evolution. It is as relevant today as it was in the 1970s. Unfortunately, the pendulum it helped push in the right direction, has swung so far beyond its maxima, never mind equilibrium that it would have been cancelled long before it made it to Netflix.

Bonus link to one of the best sitcom themes ever…

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