All in the Family exposed the lack of critical thinking on the part of most knee jerk reactionaries and fanatical 'liberals'.

There's no doubt in my mind that [had the writers been working today] Mike and Gloria would have been cheerleaders for Obama, but I wonder whether they would have had the characters figuring out he's just another shill for rapacious corporations by now?

This show was ahead of its time. It was hilarious, yet thought provoking. I still get a kick out of the reruns. It ran a little too long but was definitely groundbreaking and I always loved it during those rare times when Edith told Archie to go jump.

This show pushed a LOT of boundaries.Most shows played it REAL safe back then.I don't think we'd ever have had "Married with Children", "Southpark","Rosanne" or any number of other controversial shows if ol' Archie Bunker hadn't paved the way.The cast was stellar,and as well as being very funny,the show went where others dared not even look.

I don't know how "groovy" it was, but it was pretty ground-breaking TV, pretty cutting-edge for awhile. I can remember when it first came out; my parents sitting there laughing in front of the TV, and I laughed along with them, although I'm pretty sure I didn't know what I was laughing at. I've started watching some of the old episodes again recently, and the show hasn't aged particularly well. As it continued on through the years, too, Norman Lear and the writers tried to "humanize" Archie...he was still a bigot, but he became a curmudgeonly softie who even obtained a Jewish granddaughter (or maybe it was a niece)...thereby depriving him of that quality which had made him funny in the first place. In those early episodes, though, Carroll O'Connor can still cause me to laugh out loud sometimes.

The first 4 seasons were the best!

I enjoyed the show but ended up disliking nearly every character on it. For instance; Archie was supposed to be the Arch enemy of reason and logic with unreasonable angst for everyone he came in contact with while Mike was the all-knowing professional student who had an answer for everything. Okay - I accepted the premise. It's just that when all was said and done Archie just seemed angry and ignorant while Mike came off as a know-it-all do-nothing lump of flesh living off the world he was constantly putting down. Seemed to me he was the more genuine ass-hat since he was obviously well aware of what he was doing. One thing I did learn though - more racial and cultural slurs than I knew existed up until that time.

It was great in that it enabled the television audience to see something other than an extension of the tame and innocuous family comedy that had been served up by television for two decades, but it was also "of it's time" to the extreme.

All in the Family might be the second greatest sitcom of all time (after Cheers, and no I'm not fogetting Seinfeld, look somewhere around 289 on the list for that garbage). A lot of shows don't age well, but All in Family has done surprisingly well in that aspect, considering how much it dealt with the issues of the day. The issues may have changed, but the kinds of people haven't. Today, instead of being hippies, Michael and Gloria would just be Obama worshippers.

Gloria: "Daddy, did you know that 65% of the people murdered in the last ten years were killed by handguns?"
Archie: "Would it make you feel any better little girl if they was pushed out of windows?"