For Rob Reiner, politics was much too personal and important a project to be left to politicians. Like Michael Stivic, the “All in the Family” character that made him a star, he was a passionate, crusading liberal. And like his mentor Norman Lear, the show’s creator, he put his money — and his creative muscle — where his mouth was.
“I saw that you could at least use your celebrity, fame, whatever — influence — to try to do good, to try to spread a good word,” Mr. Reiner told me when we spoke last month when I went to interview him in the graceful, sprawling Los Angeles home where he lived and died with his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, for a book about Mr. Lear. The two men often spoke of each other in terms of father and son, and Mr. Lear previously owned the house.
Mr. Reiner spoke ruefully of the ways in which the political issues that “All in the Family” aired haunt us more than ever these days, when it seems Archie Bunker’s ghost is running the country.
“We’re hitting on the same subjects,” he told me. “They haven’t gone away. Race relations and gun control, all those things.” But in today’s fractured media environment, the collective conversation that the show’s huge weekly audience regularly sparked — aerating raw prejudice in the name of demonstrating its folly — is no longer possible.
At its peak, “All in the Family” had 40 million to 45 million people “having a shared experience” on CBS’s Saturday night lineup, Mr. Reiner noted. “And that doesn’t exist right now,” when a top-rated network show may draw 10 million viewers — a quarter the audience in a country half again as large. “He hit on the very things we cared about then, and we still care about them. Unfortunately, we’re not talking about them anymore.”
The secret of “All in the Family” was that its characters were complicated and had feelings and weren’t just cheap stereotypes. It sought to illuminate the fears and biases of Michael’s father-in-law, Archie, an aging white man from Queens in a changing world. As the show’s theme song, “Those Were the Days,” put it, he pined for when “girls were girls and men were men.” It didn’t just mock Archie; it showed him as a human.
And it showed as well the know-it-all arrogance of the younger generation, quick to lecture and slow to see its own hypocrisies. “The truth is, there are bigots who love their families. They love their wives. They’re just ignorant,” Mr. Reiner told me. “And there are liberals — they may stand for certain things, for all people to share equally in the prosperity of the country — but they’re flawed, too.”
Michael had more in common with Archie than either liked to admit and sometimes treated his wife, Gloria, with a built-in sexism he was loath to acknowledge. “Mike was caught in that world,” Mr. Reiner said. “He was a product of a male-chauvinist society. It was nuanced.”
There is little room for nuance in President Trump’s America. Today’s MAGA die-hards defend him with the same ferocity that Carroll O’Connor’s Archie defended “Richard E. Nixon,” if without the redeeming leaven of laughter that Archie’s humanity inspired. Still, even for many Republicans, the president’s posting that Mr. Rainer’s death was “reportedly” connected to his anti-Trump politics stirred up some backlash.
“No television show is going to change thousands of years of human beings killing each other over religion or territory or whatever,” Mr. Reiner said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t keep talking about it. And Norman, as tough a guy as he was, he was always optimistic that we could change.”
It was no surprise that just as Mr. Lear founded the liberal public interest group People for the American Way (which helped defeat Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court), Mr. Reiner supported successful public campaigns, such as the effort to tax Big Tobacco and finance early childhood development programs in California, and the Supreme Court fight that legalized same-sex marriage in the state.
In his 2014 memoir, “Even This I Get to Experience,” Mr. Lear summed up Mr. Reiner’s overflowing energy this way:
To be alone with Rob Reiner is to be in a crowd. His brain and his mouth, like a chain of Chinese firecrackers, are firing constantly. If that sounds like I’m describing a pain in the ass, nothing could be further from the truth. Rob was like that when I fell in love with him as a 9-year-old teaching my daughter Ellen to play jacks. What was great about Rob was that the person, the actor, the director, the friend, the participant, the activist, the star, the husband and the father all came from the center of his being.
And like his mentor, Mr. Reiner retained a resilient optimism. “We seem to be, in fits and starts, moving in the right direction,” he said. “Right now, it looks like a terrible step backward, as close to a civil war as we have ever been, and it may turn into even more violence than we’re seeing right now. But then we lurch forward, and this whole idea that Reagan talked about — the shining city on the hill, this beacon to the world — we can represent, and we do represent the rest of the world. Because you have every nationality, every region, all sexualities, all people of different stripes in one country. And if we can make it work here, then it sends the message that we are, in fact, one world.”
Todd S. Purdum, a former Los Angeles bureau chief for The Times, is the author of “Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television.” He is at work on a biography of Norman Lear.
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