re: #388 Gus

I couldn’t stop laughing. Carol O’Connor was perfect as was the rest of the cast. I grew up on “All in the Family” in many ways. It was a big change of all of us. It was groundbreaking.

My parents were conservative Republicans back then and even they loved the show, as did the rest of my family.

Totally groundbreaking: how many shows before, comedy or drama, depicted political arguments involving the actual current president and issues like poverty, war, social injustice, etc? Even today there’s not much like it. Funny thing about how we’ve changed: Reiner’s character (and probably Norman Lear) saw Nixon as a right-wing extremist at the time. Today Nixon would be a centrist Democrat, and would have little tolerance for the evangelization of his party. He was a corrupt guy, but also a reasonable and pragmatic politician (at least some of the time).