>>I was about 6 or 7 when All in the Family came on. I remember watching it (though I didn't understand some of the jokes). That show was groundbreaking.
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>>Some of the best episodes were when Archie's heart came out...Archie taking on the KKK when they were going to burn a cross on Mike's lawn, Archie consoling Gloria after her miscarriage, Archie breaking down after Edith died, and then (my favorite) Archie getting a Star of David necklace for Stephanie (even though he really never understood Judaism) and saying, "Kiddo, you gotta love someone a whole lot to give someone something like this....you gotta love everything about them"
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>>And then there were the pantomime suicides, which were priceless:
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVrET0k2TSw>>
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>>And finally.....quite possibly the funniest five minutes in the history of TV. I can quote this scene from memory, I've seen it a million times, and I still laugh my head off when I watch it.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbAh8xqGgGc>
>I was out of the country when it first came on and I remember being back in the states at one point and my sister saying "You've got to see this, you're not going to believe it".
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>I grew up with Leave it to Beaver and My Three Sons, Ozzie and Harriet and The Donna Reed Show. I thought those were pretty stupid even when I was 8. In retrospect the thing that scares me is that those shows were watched by adults!
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>I keep reminding myself that a lot of America in the 50s can be explained by the terrible trauma of growing up in the Depression and then being shipped off to a war too terrible to have been imagined. I guess regressing into white picket fence fantasy was a pretty normal reaction. Reality had really lost its appeal.
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>My generation had the luxury of rejecting safety and going out on the edge (where a lot of us fell off) It was a pretty big disconnect between the generations which I don't think I really understood until years later.
There were so few television options back then. There were three networks and that was it. And the default evening option was watching TV.
My nominee for dumbest TV show ever -- and yes, I did watch it -- was "My Mother the Car."
