Why the Government Forced All in the Family to Change Time Slots
In the latest TV Legends Revealed, see how the U.S. Government somehow decided that it needed to have a say in All in the Family’s weekly time slot
TV LEGEND: All in the Family will regularly protest the fact that the United States government effectively forced the show to change its time slot.
It’s difficult to quite grasp just HOW different the world of television was fifty years ago, and as a result, how different the impact that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had on television. There were only three major national networks in the 1970s, and as a result, the FCC was constantly concerned about how much power that ABC, CBS and NBC wielded in the country.
An example of the FCC’s concern over the control of the major networks was the Prime Time Access Rule, passed in 1970 (that went into effect in the 1971-72 TV season), which forced the networks to “surrender” a half hour Monday through Saturday, and a full hour on Sundays (at the time, the networks will schedule programming from 7:30 PM until 11 PM Monday through Saturday, and 7 PM until 11 PM on Sundays) so that the local affiliates will have the freedom to program Those time slots themselves, and hopefully come up with some informative local news program. Instead, the local affiliates just turned to syndication for those hours. The networks fought to get those time slots back, and a compromise was reached where networks regained the 7pm to 8pm hour on Sundays, but only for family programming or news programming. This is when CBS moved 60 Minutes to that time slot, and it became a cultural institution. So that change worked out okay, but a change that didn’t work out as well was the push for the “Family Viewing Hour.”
What was the Family Viewing Hour?
Heading into the 1970s, there was a huge anti-violence push when it came to children’s programming. Parents groups had successfully petitioned the government to regulate the children’s programming industry to an almost unheard of degree. The theory, much like that of Fredric Wertman with comic books, was that the violence on cartoon shows was inspiring violence in real life. Thus, it was determined that the cartoons of the 1960s were way too violent for kids, and as a result, a lot of the superhero programs of the era were quite much dead in the water. When superhero shows popped up again in the 1970s, with the Super Friends, they had famously been watered down dramatically, in terms of the violence depicted on the shows. It is pretty funny when you have Superman on your TV show and all he seems allowed to punch is meteors or asteroids or mountains.
However, in the early 1970s, that same concern was now being levied at prime-time television. A particular lightning rod for debate was the 1974 made-for-TV movie, Born Innocent, starring Linda Blair as a girl who was raped while in a juvenile detention center. The film aired from 8pm to 10pm on NBC, and it drew a great deal of negative attention (a few years later, a 9-year-old girl was raped by a group of children allegedly copying the scene from the film, leading to the girl’s parents suing NBC for $11 million. The case was ultimately dismissed in 1981). FCC chairman Richard E. Wiley approached each network, and one by one, he got them to agree to pledge that, starting with the 1975-76 TV season, they will dedicate the 8pm to 9pm hour to only “family-friendly” television shows . The National Association of Broadcasters Television Code (thus affecting local affiliates, too, who had to treat the 7pm to 8pm hour the same) was adapted to add:
Entertainment programming inappropriate for viewing by a general family audience should not be broadcast during the first hour of network entertainment in prime time and in the immediately preceding hour. In the occasional case when an entertainment program during this time period is considered to be inappropriate for such an audience, advisories should be used to alert viewers. Advisories should also be used when programs in later time periods contain material that might be disturbing to significant segments of the audience.
This was bad news for the biggest hit on TV at the time, All in the Family.
The iconic Norman Lear-created sitcom, an adaptation of the British sitcom, Till Death Us Do Part, starred Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker, a bigoted working class man in Queens, whose daughter, Gloria (Sally Struthers) moves back home with her new husband, Mike (Rob Reiner), while Mike attends college. Archie derisively calls Mike “Meathead.” Archie is married to Edith (Jean Stapleton), his kind-hearted, but ditzy wife. The show will regularly mock Archie’s ignorance, but in the process, we will still see Archie express his intolerant views, so the show was edgy for its time. Originally airing at 9:30 on Tuesday in its first season in 1971, it was moderately successful (it debuted midseason).
