How All in the Family paved the way for Atlanta, Fleabag, The Wire and Peak TV

The Atlantic

In an excerpt from Ronald Brownstein's new book Rock Me on the Water: 1974-The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics, the author describes how All in the Family -- taped at L.A.'s iconic CBS Television City -- changed TV forever. "When CBS first placed All in the Family on the air, on January 12, 1971, it irrevocably transformed television," writes Brownstein. "After a shaky first season in which it struggled to find an audience, the show prospered, rising to become No. 1 in the ratings for five consecutive years, a record unmatched at the time. All in the Family commanded national attention to a degree almost impossible to imagine in today’s fractionated entertainment landscape. Archie Bunker’s catchwords—stifle, meathead, and dingbat—all became national shorthand. Scholars earnestly debated whether the show punctured or promoted bigotry. Its success not only helped lift The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H, and the other great topical comedies of the early 1970s, but also cemented the idea that television could be used to comment meaningfully on the society around it—an idea the networks had uniformly rejected throughout all the upheaval of the 1960s. That legacy—the determination to connect the medium to the moment—reverberates through shows as diverse as Fleabag, Atlanta, Breaking Bad, The Wire, and countless others. The night that CBS initially aired All in the Family was the first step on the road toward the Peak TV that we are living through today."