Archie Bunker's America

"Archie Bunker's America discerns what was literally "in the air" as television networks tried to accommodate cultural and political swings in America from the Vietnam era through the late 1970s. Josh Ozersky's examination of the ways America changed television during a period of intense social upheaval, recuperation, and fragmentation uncovers a bold and beguiling facet of American cultural history. From the political comedy of All in the Family and Maude and the liberal hilarity of Taxi, Soap, and Saturday Night Live to the post-1960s frolics of Three's Company and apolitical programs like Happy Days and Fantasy Island, Ozersky describes the range and power of television as it echoed the larger schemes of American life." "Straightforward, engaging, and liberally illustrated, Archie Bunker's America is peppered with the stories of outsider cops and failed variety shows, of a young Bill Murray and an old Ed Sullivan, of Mary Tyler Moore, Fonzie, and the Skipper, too. Drawing on interviews with television insiders of the era, trade and industry publications, and the programs themselves, Ozersky chronicles the ongoing attempts of prime-time television to program for a fragmented audience - an audience whose greatest common denominator, by 1978, may well have been the act of watching television itself. The book also includes a foreword by renowned media critic Mark Crispin Miller and an epilogue of related commentary by Ozersky on the following decades."--Jacket.