Revisiting the Bunkers: How “All in the Family” Stands Up in 2024

There is so much going on in the news these days, I don’t know where to start. I’ll gather my thoughts for a post in the near future. For now, I’d like to write about my experience of re-watching all nine seasons of the groundbreaking series All in the Family, which ran from January 1971 to its season finale in the spring of 1979. I had continued to see episodes here and there over the years, but I never watched every episode in order before. It took me about 18 months of half-hour lunches and occasional dinners to view them all (over 200).

I was a mere child and then a teenager during the ’70s, but my conservative parents watched it faithfully and we were allowed to sit and watch with them. It was really the beginning of my awareness of the issues of the time — and, as it turns out, our time now. Nothing was off limits for the show — race, gender, war, religion, gun control, rape, miscarriage, women’s liberation, discrimination, LGBT, drag, gambling, crime, infidelity, you name it. With today’s streaming alternatives, we’re in another golden age of television but I don’t think there has been a comedy show that has come close, then or now, to poking at so many issues of our time.

One only needs to hear the show’s opening song — sung by Archie and Edith for the entire run — to hear the line, “When girls were…