Talk:Carroll O'Connor/Archives/2015

excessive personal POV

"O'Connor's own politics were liberal. He understood the Bunker character and played him not only with bombast and humor but with touches of vulnerability. The writing on the show was consistently left of center, but O'Connor often deftly skewered the liberal pieties of the day."

No, he didn't. Though a liberal myself, I objected to Archie always being wrong, and Mike always being right.

The original Archie Bunker was a vicious anti-Semitic bigot. O'Connor convinced Lear to let him play Archie differently. Archie became a (generally) affable person, who was absolutely convinced of the correctness of his point of view, because it was "logical". One might argue that Mike was equally "logical" and narrow-minded. The program never did much with this (that I recall), or delve into the matter of where one's values come from and how they influence our world view. As cleverly written and well-acted as it was, it presented a basically pro-liberal point of view that did little to promote viewer thought. I doubt it changed anyone's mind about anything. WilliamSommerwerck (talk) 15:10, 27 December 2015 (UTC)