All In the Family

40 years ago tonight, CBS aired the pilot episode of All in the Family. It was actually the third pilot (or fourth if you count the one for the English series the show was based on), on another network than the one Norman Lear originally sold it to. ABC’s decision to turn down the second pilot — which had the same script as the final version, the same two leads, and even the same theme song — has to rank as one of the great network blunders. Though to be fair, when network executives turn down a show on the belief that they can’t make it a hit, they’re probably right.

A TV writer death of note: Mickey Ross, part of the Nicholl/Ross/West team that ran All in the Family, The Jeffersons and Three’s Company, died Tuesday at the age of 89. Ross and his writing partner Bernie West (who played the dentist/songwriter in Bells Are Ringing) were, like Nicholl, in their 40s when AITF started; Norman Lear believed strongly in hiring “old” (by comedy-writer standards) writers for his shows. But while many of Lear’s shows don’t hold up today, the first five seasons of AITF, which were mostly written and/or produced by Nicholl, Ross and West, hold up extremely well. A lot of writers on the Lear and Lear-style comedies deluded themselves into believing that their work was inherently important because it dealt with big issues; the head writers of Maude, Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf, used to talk about how much more profound their show was than Mary Tyler Moore or The Odd Couple. But almost any AITF script written by Nicholl or Ross and West is a lesson in how to put character and character relationships above everything else, and how the best laughs come from lines that draw on our knowledge of character. Their work on The Jeffersons (which they created) and Three’s Company (which they developed and ran after Larry Gelbart’s original pilot was rejected) wasn’t in the same class, but those were basically joke-based shows, and they wrote for what the shows required.

You can find a number of unaired pilots on YouTube, not just ones that never got picked up (like the semi-famous “Nobody’s Watching”), but pilots for shows that did eventually get picked up with big changes. One of the most famous examples of a hit show with failed pilots was All In The Family; the first U.S. pilot based on the British series was made in 1968, the second in 1969, and the show didn’t get on the air, with a third pilot, until 1971.  Norman Lear simply would not give up trying to get a version of Till Death Us Do Part on the air. This is the second pilot, entitled “Those Were the Days.” Lear’s script is pretty much the same as the final pilot, and they had Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton in place as the Justices (they were renamed “Bunker” in the final version), but there are different actors in the other three roles: Chip Oliver (as the son-in-law), Candy Azzara (as Gloria) and D’Urville Martin (Lionel Jefferson). None of the three are as good as the three people who replaced them in the final pilot that got picked up; casting, as usual, makes all the difference in TV. Also, note that the set they went with in the final version is more spacious than the one in this pilot: instead the set being one big room as in the unaired pilot, Archie and family were given a bigger living room with a dining-room table, with the kitchen separated and used for “private” conversations. The final version is a better set in terms of comedy possibilities.