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Lear thought of Carroll O'Connor for Archie because he recalled O'Connor's "outrageous but likable" general in the 1966 movie What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? O'Connor's participation in the development of Archie's character has become so passionate that it frequently causes tension on the Family staff. At times he flatly refuses to perform a script that does not conform to his conception of the role. An example was last season's episode about Archie's being trapped in a stalled elevator with a middle-class black and a Puerto Rican girl about to give birth to a baby. It was used only after Lear overrode O'Connor's objections that it "wouldn't work." (Such difficulties with O'Connor made the renegotiation of his contract last fall "a bloodbath," according to one Tandem source.)
"When we see a helicopter land on the roof of the CBS building and a man in a dark suit from New York get out," jokes one of Lear's writers, "we know we're in censorship trouble." Network censors are rarely as melodramatic as that. Usually they are a task force of some two dozen men and women, each of whom oversees a portion of a network's total programming (including commercials); they review scripts and sit in on tapings and screenings, questioning anything that seems to conflict with federal broadcasting law or their network's standards of taste.
But if the helicopter is more writer's fancy than fact, the censorship troubles of Yorkin and Lear are all too real. Family, particularly, has at least one big crisis a season. Two winters ago, it was over the episode about homosexuality that President Nixon so disliked; last winter, a show on which Son-in-Law Mike's exam jitters made him sexually impotent. Smaller crises abound, as when CBS succeeded in knocking out the word "Mafia" from one script, the term "smartass" from another.
So far, Lear has staved off every major threat with a combination of logic, persuasion, threats to cancel a whole episode (or the whole series), and scathing contempt for the censors' "thinktank mentality," his term for the corporate and governmental attitude that underestimates "how wise-heart a great many Americans are."
Doing things over is one thing; overdoing them is another. Amid all their taking of pains, Yorkin and Lear rarely forget the importance of not being earnest. Their shows are, after all, only situation comedies. The scripts, however inventive, tend more toward formula than organic form. The characterizations are still exaggerated cutouts from the fabric of real life.
"Sure we want to get the social theme," says Family Writer Alan Ross, "but the show is a half-hour comedy on commercial TV, and if it's not funny you might as well be on the lecture platform." As George S. Kaufman pointed out, speaking of Broadway, the savage moralizing of satire is what closes at the end of one week; sitcoms must go on week after week. Acknowledging this, Yorkin and Lear are entertainers who brandish the weapons of satire but use them sparingly. Their Bunkers and Sanfords are sheep in wolves' clothing —domesticated in every sense from a tougher breed of British precursors.