Meathead's America: Rob Reiner's contribution to 70s political culture (G&R 450)

Summary

Green & Red Podcast Episode 450:

Meathead's America: Rob Reiner’s Contribution to 70s Political Culture
Hosts: Bob Buzzanco & Scott Parkin
Airdate: December 20, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Bob Buzzanco and Scott Parkin reflect on the cultural and political impact of Rob Reiner—specifically his iconic role as “Meathead” (Mike Stivic) on All in the Family—and the transformative effect of 1970s television on American social consciousness. Using recent tributes to Reiner following his tragic murder as a springboard, the hosts trace a lineage from the radical content of Lear-era sitcoms through the subsequent evolution (and corporatization) of American TV, examining how media shapes political awareness, normalizes or challenges social norms, and is now threatened by right-wing billionaire consolidation.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Rob Reiner, "Meathead," and the Significance of 1970s TV

• The episode opens with somber acknowledgment of Rob and Michelle Reiner’s murder, and a pivot to examining Reiner’s cultural legacy as both Meathead and as a progressive artist ([00:44–01:59]).
• All in the Family is lauded as perhaps the “most important, substantial” American TV show ([02:07]), breaking molds by confrontationally addressing taboo issues via its character dynamics: Archie Bunker (Carol O’Connor) as bigoted everyman, Mike Stivic ("Meathead," Reiner) as his impassioned liberal foil ([03:14–04:21]).

“Rob Reiner really, I think, created a real type…someone who's unapologetic…fiery…He's different than what we would see in what we think about liberals today. He was a fighter.”
—Bob Buzzanco, [05:14]

• The tension between Archie and Mike, often erupting over the dinner table, was a lens for exploring race, class, Vietnam, gender, and sexuality ([06:12–06:33]).
• The hosts position All in the Family as the explosive origin for a wave of socially-conscious sitcoms, especially those created by Norman Lear.

Barrier-Breaking Shows and Portrayal of Social Issues

Spin-Offs and Sitcom Universe

• The Jeffersons: Pioneering representation of a successful Black family and mixed-race couples. Showed blunt racial tensions between George Jefferson and Archie ([07:02–08:08]).
• Maude: Centered on second-wave feminism, abortion rights, etc., offering a bolder, urban liberalism ([12:42–13:33]).
• Good Times: Spotlighted Black working-class life and radical politics in Chicago's projects ([13:23–14:36]).
• Sanford and Son, Chico and the Man: Embedded economic realities (poverty, labor, race) into mainstream TV ([15:06–15:53]).
• One Day at a Time and Alice: Single working mothers, class struggle, women’s experiences ([16:03–17:36]).

“Working class culture and what I would call…oppositional culture was there. These women, like, bitched, but they also fought back. They complained about their wages…and the politics of relationships, gender, sex. But they fought back.”
—Bob Buzzanco, [17:04]

Moral Lessons and Humanization

• Many shows (e.g., MASH*, Barney Miller) challenged war, racism, sexism, and normalized LGBTQ presence, even if through the lens of (sometimes unrealistic) institutional benevolence ([08:08–19:37]).

“They always treat them sympathetically. Again…not really how cops are. But I also thought it was important in the sense that it humanized these folks.”
—Buzzanco on Barney Miller, [19:06]

The Role of Education and Class Mobility

• Mike Stivic as a graduate student represented not only 70s progressive activism, but also then-growing middle-class aspirations—contrasted sharply to today’s economically precarious, maligned liberal arts student ([34:43–36:06]).

“Mike Stevick is a grad student, right…at the time…was a vehicle to becoming part of the middle class…Now we’re at the point where education is being deliberately destroyed.”
—Buzzanco, [34:43--35:54]

Media Evolution, Privatization, and Political Shifts

The 1980s: Political Retreat and Copaganda

• The Reagan era brought a turn away from “oppositional” TV; popular programming (e.g., Cheers, Frasier) became apolitical, focused on “hanging out,” while police procedurals like Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and Law & Order ushered in “copaganda” ([21:09–22:19]).

• Miami Vice is analyzed as both visually thrilling and “propaganda” about pervasive corruption in the War on Drugs ([21:41–22:17]). The show’s creator, Anthony Yerkovich, is noted as a libertarian with ambiguous politics ([21:41]).

Reality TV and Neoliberal Narcissism

• Rise of reality TV (The Apprentice, Survivor, The Real World) signals a shift to individualism and atavistic competition ([23:22–24:00]).

The Age of the Antihero

• The Simpsons, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men all critique American decline, materialism, and the consequences of capitalism ([24:40–26:41]).

“If you want to study post-war capitalism…a great place to start [is Mad Men]…then you could go to the hardcore books.”
—Buzzanco, [26:18]

Corporate Consolidation & Right-Wing Takeover

• The hosts warn of “manufacturing consent” and rightward cultural shift as right-wing billionaires (Ellison, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos) monopolize entertainment/media corporations ([27:12–29:00]).
  • Paramount’s new right-leaning agenda: canceling Colbert, installing Barry Weiss to run CBS News, pushing out writers/show-runners unwilling to toe the conservative line ([28:25–30:05]).
• The effect of conglomerate control: sanitized/censored news, fewer investigative exposés, proliferation of “culture war” content ([30:05–32:36]).
• Despite this, the hosts note Americans’ exhaustion with far-right content, citing failed shows and mass cancellation of subscriptions as audiences search out independent, social media-based sources ([32:01–33:32]).

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On “Meathead’s” Legacy:
  "Rob Reiner really, I think, created a real type...fiery...different than what we would see in what we think about liberals today. He was a fighter." —Buzzanco, [05:14]

• Culture Shift Catalyzed by TV:
  "If you look at mashed, that too had episodes about race, about women...villages are bombed and you have refugees and you have women forced into prostitution and knocked up by American soldiers. Absolutely." —Buzzanco, [09:30]

• Archie Bunker's Political Arc:
  "In 1960, I guarantee you, Archie Bunker voted for JFK...by 1968...he's probably thinking, my 1968 is, wait a minute, I'm paying higher taxes for these people. So this is how you see that evolution from probably somebody who was a Kennedy Democrat to a Nixon Reagan Republican." —Buzzanco, [10:08]

• On Later TV’s Political Retreat:
  "Even the sitcoms, like Cheers...didn't have political content. Those were just people hanging out, you know, people hanging out in different venues." —Buzzanco, [21:52]

• On Media Consolidation:
  "There was like over 60 entertainment companies back then. Now I think there's four or five. And so we're seeing right wing billionaires...trying to take over like these major streaming shows and studios..." —Parkin, [27:12]

• Sign of the Times:
  "We’re not in Archie and Meathead’s living room anymore and we’re not even in Tony and Walter White’s living room anymore. Or maybe we are. Maybe that’s the...they’ve just moved into the White House." —Parkin, [27:00]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:44–01:59: Introduction; Rob Reiner’s murder and cultural legacy
• 02:07–06:12: The radical innovation of All in the Family; "Meathead" as liberal foil
• 07:02–13:33: Spin-offs—The Jeffersons, Maude, Good Times—addressing race, gender, and class
• 15:53–17:36: Economic realities in 1970s sitcoms; working class on TV
• 19:37–21:09: Transition to 1980s TV; rise of "copaganda" and Big Pharma
• 21:41–22:19: Miami Vice as critique and glamorization
• 24:40–26:41: Anti-hero renaissance: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men
• 27:12–29:00: Modern media consolidation; billionaire takeover
• 34:43–36:06: Education, class mobility, and shifting value of the liberal arts
• 38:44-39:43: Satirical political closing; financial appeals

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Tone and Style

The conversation is candid, nostalgic, analytical, and irreverent—often blending historical insight with personal anecdotes and sharp political asides. Hosts use humor and pop culture references to tackle serious subjects, critique current trends, and connect media evolution to broader shifts in American politics and society.

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Summary Takeaways

• Rob Reiner’s “Meathead,” and 1970s sitcoms, played a crucial role in mainstreaming discussions of race, class, gender, and war on American television.
• The radical, working-class, or "oppositional" spirit of that era’s TV is sharply contrasted with today’s sanitized, conglomerate-controlled media landscape—tilted ever more to the right by billionaire ownership.
• “Copaganda,” reality TV, and anti-hero dramas each reflected and influenced changing attitudes towards politics, power, and the "American dream."
• As traditional media consolidates and political content narrows, audiences increasingly turn to alternative, grassroots channels for meaningful discourse and real news.

In the end, the hosts urge listeners to support independent media, remain vigilant about culture’s corporatization, and recognize the persistent power of the radical voices, like Rob Reiner’s, that shaped so much of American cultural and political imagination.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to Green and Red Scrappy Politics for Scrappy People, a regular podcast on radical environmental and anti capitalist politics. Brought to you by Bob Bozanko and Scott Parkins.

[B]

Welcome to the silky smooth sounds of the Green and Red podcast. I'm your co host, Scott Parkin in Berkeley, California. And as always, I am joined by.

[A]

Bob Bazaigo and Niles Ohio. And good afternoon. Meathead.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, nice to. Nice to see you, Arch. I want to say that we will Talk longer than 18 minutes and this speech will not be blaming Joe Biden, sleepy Joe Biden for everything. I just want to put that out there.

[A]

But why not? There's plenty to blame him for.

[B]

Yeah, that's true, that's true. So today we're going to start off with a little bit of serious, a little bit of a serious topic and then turn it into a little bit of some of our bigger pop culture kind of conversations. I'm gonna start off and we were, I guess, inspired to do this episode by the horrific murder of Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle, who were recent victims to a horrible crime, probably family related. And so this is a terrible tragedy. But. And there's a lot of people who are doing a lot of looking back on Rob Reiner's career and he had a big career as a director and he had a big career as an actor and actually some of his documentary stuff with some of the more interesting stuff that he did that he just did, like last year, for example. But we're going to talk a little bit about where he got his start, which is in like 1970s sitcom television. And as we like to make these things like really relevant to creating political consciousness and things like that, we're going to talk a little bit about the impact of 1970s circumstances, sitcom television, particularly Norman Lear shows and CBS shows on as a result of the creation of political and social consciousness and how it contributed to more of that.

[A]

Yeah, that's in many ways, I don't know if it's the golden age, but it's golden age of television.

[B]

And it's our golden age of television.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Especially, yeah, we grew up on Adam and Me more than you, but. And the tributes to Rob Reiner have pointed out that he was on all in the Family, which you can make a very easy argument that's like the most kind of, I don't know, important, substantial, let's say, television show ever. And it occurred in an era where a lot of TV shows were taking on issues that they had before for a very short period of time is when I was really little, I actually don't remember that well, but I would watch Gilgan's island or the Addams Family, stuff like that. The Munsters and they were silly, goofy shows. Leave it to Beaver. Before I didn't see that, I watched it in reruns and Guys Get Smart, which was political and then Cold War, but it was just played over the top for laughs. And I think. And you know this way better than me, you're far more of a historian of TV and movies than I am. But I think all in the Family really broke the mold. And it wasn't at the first, not necessarily TV show, because you have movies that made for TV movies and some dramas that would take on more important issues. But this is prime time, the most important, like, popular show in America, has incredible cultural cachet. Didn't it break the mold and wasn't it like the first to really touch on these issues?

[B]

Yeah, I'm as far. Especially as far as situation comedies go. It did. I would point back to like maybe a decade before when you have the Twilight Zone, which I felt like was actually really political.

[A]

Oh, absolutely. Oh, no doubt about the war and. Oh, yeah, Civil rights. Yeah.

[B]

But on the Family became like the number one show.

[A]

Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah.

[B]

In America, it was based. It was a Norman Lear who's just recently left us, I think maybe in 20 years ago, like 123. Yeah, it was his adaptation and he was like. He also was like a left liberal minded person. And it was his adaptation of a British TV series called Till Death Do Us Part. And all in the Family broke down television barriers. And like, I would actually say that the main character of all in the Family, Archie Bunker, played by Carol o', Connor, is really still an archetype in American society today. If you go to the Smithsonian, go there before it becomes the Trump Smithsonian. But they have Archie's chair in the Smithsonian. And so if anything, he's a important cultural icon to emerge from the 70s.

[A]

For those people, Archie Bunker is a role model, not like an architect.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And Rob Reiner obviously had a vital role. He played off against Archie. He was the very earnest liberal. When you look at it now, it ages differently. You cringe a little bit at some of. Mike Stivic was his name and he was Polish. And Archie took great delight in calling him ethnic slurs and things like that. He would go off into soliloquies, which at the time were very powerful. And it could be about Vietnam War, could be about civil Rights and race could be about women. I saw a clip the other day of Edith actually had a gay friend. I believe there was a show about transgender. There was a transgender character in one of the shows. And like you said, like, I remember the Twilight Zone, but that I wouldn't. I don't know, it's unfair, I guess, to call it a cult show, a cult classic, but didn't have. It was very popular. But all the family, like you said, was everywhere. It was like the COVID of TV Guy, the COVID of Time magazine, and number one and all that. And they dealt with these issues. And Rob Reiner's character, in many ways, along with Carol o', Connor, were really the fulcrum. They were the tension. And the women, in typical fashion, were always trying to ease the tensions and things like that. But Rob Reiner really, I think, created a real type of that you'll see going forward in tv, someone who's unapologetic, he's fiery. He's not apologetic. He's different than what we would see in what we think about liberals today. He was a fighter, that kind of thing.

[B]

And part of it is he's the spoil to Archie. Right? Yeah. Is Archie represents this white ethnic. He's a World War II vet. He's a working guy. Like, I think in different narrations of the show, he is a warehouse supervisor. He works construction. Later on, they have a spinoff show called Archie's Place, where he's a bar owner, but he's really. He's written. But Mike Stivic, meathead, Rob Reiner's character is very. The foil to Archie's world.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And Mike was nothing but a hippie and a pinko and a do nothing. He was in graduate school. He would go get arrested at protests and things like that. And. And the tension was always over the kitchen, the dinner table. And they were. We would argue about issues and. And then we would see all these issues around race and the war and class and sexuality and all kinds of stuff emerge from that. Yeah. And it was.

[A]

It.

[B]

It really. Not only is it, like, breaks the mold and we create like a cultural icon that is Archie Bunker and to a lesser extent, Mike Stivic. But then it also opens up the door for these sort of more socially minded television shows, racially minded television shows really, just like, proliferate. Proliferate. Excuse me, proliferate into the sort of like, into the ethos. Right. Yeah.

[A]

I mean, it's.

[B]

And many of them are spinoffs of all in the Family.

[A]

Yeah. You have. You're Coming out of what seemed to be an incredible triumph in the civil rights era, we have these and all in the Family, prominently disgraced black characters. And one of the major spinoffs, of course was the Jeffersons, which featured a character who was Archie's neighbor. Sherman Hemsley and Archie Bunker, Carol o'. Connor. They had some amazing scenes, really racially charged scenes. There's one, it was at a. An engagement party for Lionel, who was Jefferson's son and Mike Stivic's best friend, Meathead's best friend and his wife's parents were mixed race couples. And you didn't really see that kind of stuff in comedies and in popular shows like that. And so this kind of opened the floodgates, I think. And in the 70s, I grew up in that era where you didn't you watch TV shows for laughs, but you learn something right along with all in the Family. The most popular show in those early 70s years was MASH, right. Which is the most. Not a Norman Lear show, but based on a movie, based on a novel, a Robert Altman movie. But I think in terms of pop culture, the most anti war thing you're ever going to see. Most anti war kind of representation of the Korean War.

[B]

Yeah, but it's really. Which is a metaphor for the Vietnam metaphor.

[A]

And it also, if you look at mashed, that too had episodes about race, about women. The nurses were a major factor in that. And Alan Alden made a point of that when he went on, when he took the role. He said, I want this to actually talk about the war in its totality, the nurses and racial issues and things like that. You had a crazy CIA agent that was named Flag.

[B]

Yeah, I think so.

[A]

Who would show up. And he was the kind of conspiracy CIA guy who thought that Hawkeye and Trapper were communists and all that kind of stuff.

[B]

I think another important thing that that MASH does is because you see a lot in the 80s and 90s, you see a lot of shows about the Vietnam War. Like by the late 80s it becomes like a very much like a thing and fairly what I would call like a fairly progressive view of it compared to what we had seen like in the early 80s or in other periods or contrast with the World War II period. One of the things that MASH does that not even those like more progressive, like Vietnam, the 80s era Vietnam War movies do is what they do in MASH is they actually really look at the perspective of the Koreans too. It's not just the perspective of the American servicemen. There's many a Korean Character who is somehow victimized by both the North Koreans, by the South Koreans, by the Americans. And that's also in the film MASH as well.

[A]

And I think villages are bombed and you have refugees and you have women forced into prostitution and knocked up by American soldiers. Absolutely.

[B]

Deal with that.

[A]

And again, they came around at the same time, but I think they played off each other. I think they both, like all in the Family, made MASH easier and vice versa. Right. They both were dealing with these very different. I mean, they're different in the sense one set in War Zone, the other one set in New York. And I just remember at the time, Archie Bunker was portrayed as a buffoonish character. Right. And you could do that now you couldn't do that. Right. Because Archie Bunker has taken over. He's won. That's who America is now. But at the time, he was now.

[B]

The who's in the Oval Office. Right.

[A]

Yeah. I remember, like, when I taught and I would talk about the evolution of the 1960s and the kind of backlash, and my point was always, like, in 1960, I guarantee you, Archie Bunker voted for JFK, and in 1964, he probably voted for LBJ and probably had no issue with the civil rights era. By 1968, you're talking about you have Nixon and you have the Southern Strategy and the backlash. And he's probably thinking, my 1968 is, wait a minute, I'm paying higher taxes for these people. And so this is how you see that evolution from probably somebody who was a Kennedy Democrat to a Nixon Reagan Republican.

[B]

Yeah, or a Reagan Democrat as they later.

[A]

Or a Reagan Democrat. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

The other thing when we were talking about Archie before, and you saying that reminds me of this is the other thing that's happening right before this comes out is they have the hard hat riot in Hard rat riots in New York. And then Nixon, obviously, with the Southern Strategies, figures out how to not only turn, like, white Southerners into Republican voters, but also white ethnics in places like working class Queens, which is where all the family takes place.

[A]

One of the most moving episodes I remember was Mike was against the war, obviously, and they were having. I don't think it was a holiday, but they're having one of Archie's friends over whose son was killed in Vietnam. And. And Archie was just like, adamant about Mike or maybe. I think, actually, I think Mike had a guest over too, who was maybe a draft dodger. Maybe he was going to Canada or he gone to Canada or something. I don't remember the specifics. But the point was Archie was very upset. He didn't want them there because his friend's son had died. It turns out the guy said, my son died for nothing. And he said, I respect these folks for what they're doing. And I'm getting choked up thinking about it. I just remember when I saw it, I was like, wow, Barry Weiss would not allow that today on cbs.

[B]

No. And I think that's an important thing to point out, too. Is that like how I. We'll talk more about this later. But I. To point out that CBS is now owned by Paramount, which is they have an agenda to shift the culture back to the right. And so they're looking at programming in on their streaming sites or on their network television or whatever, to the right. And I'm going to talk more about that.

[A]

Maybe they'll take off on the family, but. And on the family, it doesn't necessarily directly give rise to something like mash, but other shows do. We mentioned the Jeffersons, which didn't have the political content of the Jefferson, I think was just there, right. You had mixed race couples. You had Archie and Jefferson going at it. You had a wealthy black man, which you didn't really see on tv, a successful, wealthy black man, very confident. He and Archie would go at it and generally he'd get the better of Archie. Another spinoff was Maude, who was Edith's.

[B]

Cousin, but also another foil. Another foil to Archie.

[A]

Another foil to Archie, right? Oh, God. Yeah. Archie and Maude hated each other and got into arguments all the time. And she had her own show which dealt with a lot of issues of really that kind of second. First. Second wave feminism, women's rights, sexual harassment, abortion. Maude had an abortion. I don't know if that's happened again on TV since then.

[B]

Mad Men. It happened on Mad Men.

[A]

Oh, yeah, that's right. But really, I think. And so many people, there's a cultural component to our educations. And so I remember watching these shows and I was already predisposed toward ideas like that. But that really helped solidify when you saw it, because I said, oh, this is mainstream stuff. This is no big deal. They're showing it on tv. Of the spinoffs, my favorite was Good Times.

[B]

Right. Which is actually technically a spin off of Maude because Esther Rose, right. Was Maude's made.

[A]

Yeah, Esther, I want to say mention.

[B]

That something about that real quick with Maude is that Maud, even though she's liberal and very outspoken on women's issues and civil rights and things like that, she's also like a more upper, upper class, upper middle class liberal compared to Archie, where she has a black maid. I just want to. I think that's an interesting thing to point out.

[A]

She's a New York liberal. I mean, a lot of, especially his early movies, Woody Allen always had characters like that. There were women who were independent and. But they also were part of that kind of Central park elite thing too. But Good Times, the song, right, talks about easy credit ripoffs, layoffs, and it's just the limiting the projects. In Chicago, John Amos, the breakthrough star was J.J. walker, Jimmy Walker. And he was clownish, right? A Kid Dynamite and all that. But if you look beyond that, you had. The sister was really smart, the brother who was like really precocious and very smart. They, they wore afros. They talked about black nationalism, they talked about the man, they talked about Mr. Charlie. Really? Wow. When you think about that, in the early 70s, you could have these kinds of shows which were very prominent and very well received. Good Times was a top 10 show.

[B]

And it's a little bit of chicken or the egg because. Because I think that there's an element of this becomes mainstream because some of what the. The social change that we see through the 60s and early 70s becomes mainstream. But then also it also helped break barriers. It also helped bring about like some social change as well. And it created a new normalization of things, I think.

[A]

And again, I'm not a historian of this stuff, but I think it also opened roles for like black actors and women actors.

[B]

And.

[A]

Because until then, I think, what was it Diane Carroll was like the first like black main character on a TV show or something like that. And then you had things like Good Times. You had. It wasn't political, but a comedy like Chico and the man, which featured like kind of Hispanic characters, Chicano characters and Sanford and Son. Sanford and Son, junkyard. Red Fox is an old comedian, but it's set in the junkyard. And much of the humor revolves around how poor they are. And that's the thing, like poverty is like a key theme. Poverty is not hard to find in these sitcoms. I think of like later in life shows that I watch, whether it be something like cheers or 30 Rock or whatever, those are set in kind of elite institutions or at least well off institutions or something like that. But these shows like, really were set in like projects.

[B]

And then the working class and the.

[A]

Working class and on the streets and people were junkyards. In the case of Sanford and Sons. So even when it wasn't political, it was There, like, you could see the material differences.

[B]

There was a. There's. Because I went through and made a list of a lot of these shows, and I'm not even gonna get to talk about all of them. But one of them was this show that I liked as a kid called One Day at a Time, which was about a divorced single mom, working single mom, raising her two daughters. But the. But then the other sort of main character, who was like a favorite of the fans was the working class white super of the Schneider. The working class white super of their building set. Set in India in Indianapolis.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so I think. And his best friend was a guy named Beer Belly.

[A]

So somebody told me they rebooted that one day at a time. There's a new one out. I had no idea.

[B]

I don't know.

[A]

But no, that was. Right. It was a single mom. And you saw, like, Alice, based on Scorsese's movie. Alice doesn't live here anymore. Alex is a big hit woman in a diner. Single mom trying to take care of wisecracking friends at the diner. The kind of. The owner is this big, gruff guy, but he's got a good heart, that kind of thing. So working class culture and what I would call, like, oppositional culture was there. These women, like, bitched, but they also fought back. They complained about, like, the. Their wages and their women were making less than men and all that kind of stuff. And then the politics of relationships, politics of gender, the politics of sex. But they fought back. Right. And this was center. This struggle. These material conditions were a big part of that era that was just right there. And you couldn't miss it. One more. Again, not connected to Lear and Rob Reiner specifically, but I think fits into that framework. And I think the point here is that all in the Family makes all of these possible. All in the Family brought the floodgates.

[B]

Broke the floodgates.

[A]

Yeah. And because it was so well done and it was so popular and it made all these other possibles. One more. Which is ironic because you know how I feel about cop shows and Copaganda. But it was Barney Miller I thought was different, too. They were good cops. Unrealistic, no doubt. Right. You're at the precinct. Barney Miller, how Lyndon was in charge. And then you had this kind of crazy cast of characters. Jack, Sue, Max Gale, who's a real lefty in real life. Ron Glass, who I liked. He was my fashion icon. Whenever I would, like when I was growing up, I wanted to dress like Ron Glass, not Harris. But, you know, in that show the cops were good guys and they wanted to go by the procedures and they want to beat people up and they were sympathetic and all that's unrealistic. But the fact of the matter is, like in the 70s you could do that. Right. And these guys were decent humans. There maybe for the first time in sitcoms, they had gay characters who. They made fun of them and stuff. But they became like more important to the show as the years went on and were actually treated. And Barney, there were times when Barney would intercede on their behalf. So you're dealing with issues that you hadn't dealt with before. Yeah.

[B]

And in many ways with having gay characters and one of the main or supporting characters was gay, isn't that right? And Barney Miller. Or did they just have recur. Maybe they just had guessed.

[A]

No, I think it was Marty and I can't remember the other one's name.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. But what they do is that also humanizes.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And this is post Stonewall too, in New York.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. And so that's a theme. In the first year there were episodes where they brought in a cross dresser. Right. What you're seeing today, right. That's those old laws which we laughed at. Right. If you were dressed in clothes that didn't fit your gender, you could be arrested. And they did that. And they always treat them sympathetically. Again, like it's not really how cops are. But I also thought it was important in the sense that it humanized these folks. Right. You had runaway kids and you had political themes, political terrorism and stuff like that. So again, a show that I think educated people in a more progressive way.

[B]

Right. Do. So maybe we want to move into like later years.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I think it, the, the point is pretty obvious. Right. On the Family. And I think Rob Reiner's character is so critical in this. We're not going to do a. Kind of a tribute to Rob Reiner's career because it's out there and you can find it anywhere. The movies he made and his political views and all that kind of stuff. Big Democrat, big liberal and all that.

[B]

Kind of liberal Mitch is what the people have been calling him.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the shows that followed in the 70s, which I would consider it was political TV, the golden age, I think, came out, emerged from that. The kind of characters created in all in the Family.

[B]

As we get into the 80s, we still see these sort of more social issue minded shows which also portray people who are marginalized in our society in like more human ways. And then through the Reagan years, We start to get more into what we affectionately call cop Get. And I actually, Steven Pachko did a lot to make propaganda a real thing. I do feel like his first show, his first big hit actually called Hill Street Blues, looked at things. It was much. It was about a police precinct, but it was also like looked at social issues more than you. You saw in like lots of other television, which I thought was good. But then as his career progresses, we see. And we see all the people who work on his shows. That's when we see NYPD Blue, which is definitely propaganda. And we see Law and Order, which is like the Godfather of propaganda, in my opinion. And so that's like where we are, the 80s and 90s.

[A]

I got to bring up, as I always do, Miami Vice. Right. Like the first time I saw it, I watched it because of the music and the visuals and all that. And then I watched it again many years later. I watched the whole thing. And everybody's corrupt. The judges War on Drugs is a joke. It's a fucking scam. The cops are corrupt. The Judges are corrupt. The Coast Guard's corrupt. The CIA is corrupt. Everybody's getting a cut from the war on drugs. And so it's propaganda. Doc Prockin and Tubbs are literally rock stars in the 80s, if you watch it closely. And the guy created, Anthony Yurkovich, wasn't he kind of a libertarian, had his own views on things?

[B]

Yeah, I believe he was. And then Michael Mann is the other creator.

[A]

Michael Mann was the other creator, yeah. But I think Yurkovich. Didn't he like write it or something like that?

[B]

Yeah, I think they both did. But yeah, yeah, Michael Mann definitely became the bigger. But again.

[A]

But again, like. And honestly, like in the 80s, I quit watching TV. The 80s had a lot of things going on. And even the sitcoms, like I mentioned before, like Cheers was the most popular sitcom in that decade and they had spin offs, Fraser and all that. But those didn't really have political content. Those were just people hanging out, you know, people hanging out in different venues. Let's hang out in the bar, let's hang out in the coffee shop. Let's hang out in the office, whatever. We could hang out in the podcast. We could go the Green and Red, the TV show.

[B]

Yeah, we go to Central Perk.

[A]

I never, I'm not lying. Never saw that show. Never once.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I know.

[A]

I feel like I know it. Cause it's all over the place, but I've never watched that episode.

[B]

The other interesting wave of television that we wanted to touch on today is the sort of post 911 shows, which is like a version of Copaganda, which is the sort of Homeland. Like we were just joking about it before we started recording, but the Homeland Security shows. And so the two that really pop up are 24 and the show Homeland with Claire Danes, which are propaganda for like the CIA and for intelligence and for torture and state sponsored torture. And if you turn on like network television today, those are the shows that you still see. Like CBS and ABC and NBC are like full of those Special Forces, Navy SEALs, intelligence, JAG. Yeah, yeah. All of those shows are like what dominates in the.

[A]

The last 25 years kind of reality shows emerge. I mean, is like the first. But when did those.

[B]

Was that around in the early 2000s, like Survivor, the Apprentice.

[A]

Right. Which are all like this atavistic, like fight for survival. Survival of the fittest.

[B]

The first. The first sort of reality show that I remember is MTV's the Real World where they had a bunch of. It was like a sort of pre version of. It was like a pre version of Friends where it was a bunch of people just like who are all just put into a living space together in New York and then later in San Francisco and then other places and then they just like record to see what happens. That's the first reality show I really remember.

[A]

Yeah, I was thinking they go back to the huge ship like at the beginning of the seventies. By far the most popular shows, like all in the family, maybe MASH by the end of the 70s. It's Dallas. Right. They show about these atavistic oil people who just are like horrible humans.

[B]

And they're all Dynasty and then Dynasty too. That's the same thing.

[A]

It just. This is like these. This is the like Ushers in the Reagan era where greed is good. Even before Gordon Gekko said it. That's what you were like if you watch Dallas and Dynasty. Yeah, Greed is good, man.

[B]

The Dynasty had cameos from Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger.

[A]

I did not know that.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Unlike Richard Nixon on Laughing.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Nixon was on Laughing Socket to me.

[B]

So.

[A]

Should have won an Emmy for that. Should have won an Emmy because we talked a lot about comp again and reality shows. But there's also this kind of renaissance in the like late 90s 90s of the anti hero. Like I would always include like Homer Simpson and the Simpsons in that because.

[B]

I didn't sleep disappear.

[A]

But this is also when you get like Tony Soprano and Walter White and Don Draper and Saul Goodman after that. And those are not These are not like America's great. These are not like exceptional shows. Oh, look how great America is. They're actually like showing American decline. And so that's why like Tony Sopranos and Bobster and Walter White's making meth and Don Draper's just a scoundrel and advertising, which is like one of the most atavistic capitalist enterprises you could find. So you do have a return to some of those themes. And David Chase has said like dazzling, like in many interviews, in fact, he said this is a show about capitalism.

[B]

Yeah. Consumerism and capitalism. Yeah, yeah. But so is Breaking Bad and so.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And so is Mad Men as well. Yeah, basically. What Mad Men, one of the things I love about Madman, I've said this on this show many times, is it basically shows you the evolution of how they make buying things and being a consumer more important to you than relationships with other human beings.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

And that's what that, that's what that show. If you take out the soap opera. And then there's also social issues which really come up and Mad Men around civil rights, women's issues and things like that, abortion. But if you take those two layers away, then it's about this history of consumer capitalism, which I think is important. And to watch the show and when you realize that is mind blowing as.

[A]

A scholar, that those issues always interest me. So I've read a bunch about it even before and Mad Men, obviously it reaches more people, but it explains it in a more smooth way. So if you watch Mad Men and you're getting really an academic lesson without the high brow beating. So it's. If you want to study post war capitalism and that's a great place to start, then you could go to the hardcore books and get all that fill it in.

[B]

But. And if you want to study like the sort of post Cold War capitalism, I think Sopranos and Breaking Bad, like really good.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Opportunities to do that. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

But we're not there anymore, are we?

[B]

No. Now we're in the.

[A]

We're not. We're not in Kansas anymore.

[B]

Now we're in the Trump capitalist era.

[A]

We're not in Archie and Meathead's living.

[B]

Room anymore and we're not even in Tony and Walter White's living room anymore. Or maybe we are. Maybe that's the. Maybe they've just moved into the White House. Right. Is that what's happened?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Walter White would probably get a pardon these days, especially if he was when got himself elected to office.

[A]

Yeah. If you donated enough to trial people.

[B]

Again yeah, but the other thing that we wanted to talk on is we're seeing there's a, the whole episode itself about this sort of manufacturing consent and concentration of media corporations, conglomerates, billionaires taking over. And we want to touch on that because it to, to us, it, it speaks to. We look at this period in the 70s with all in the Family, Meathead Archie and things like that. There was like over 60 entertainment companies back then. Now I think there's four or five. And so we're seeing right wing billionaires like the Ellison family. Larry Ellison made his fortune with Oracle, but he's basically bought a couple of media networks for his son, which is, for his son David, which is merged into Paramount Skydance. They just tried to buy Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers Discovery and were rebuffed. We're seeing where these right wing, like they have right wing politics, they have Zionist politics and they're trying to take over like these major streaming shows and studios that produce like film and other.

[A]

Musk and Zuckerberg already have.

[B]

Yeah. And Bezos.

[A]

And Bezos, yeah.

[B]

And so one of the things that we saw like out of the Paramount Skydance merger was they canceled Colbert. They hired Barry Weiss who has no, no business doing this. But like they hired IDF enthusiast very wise to run CBS News. They, they allowed them to have a nice settlement. Kamala with CBS, with Trump over the interview of 60. The new anchor is going to be.

[A]

An avowed Zionist, Tony Duke. What's his name?

[B]

Duke.

[A]

Duke Dupaco. Dukeably or. Yeah, I don't know how to pronounce.

[B]

It, but yeah, yeah. And so I think it's just like really important that part of what we're probably going to be seeing is like some attempts at culture shift. I still think movies and television and music are very much have a. Can have a progressive slant and we've done lots of shows on even like recent popular culture stuff that has a progressive slant. But the Ellison, David Ellison is looking to change that. Taylor Sheridan, who's the creator of Yellowstone and Landman and other shows like that, which I actually think give you a view into red state America, but it's not the sort of pro raw red state America view. I actually just left Paramount because Ellison was trying to push him to be more overtly political with right wing politics. He left for NBC and so I. He wanted him to do a show. He wanted to make a show about the 250th anniversary of America. And it's great that there's creators out there who have some principle, but I'M just, I just worry that with all these like super wealthy people who made money off of tech and have these terrible politics, we're gonna just, we're gonna. There's our. There's also a lot of garbage out there still too. That's reality TV to me. But.

[A]

And we don't have to romanticize the past. Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather did some good stuff, but it was, yes, it was always corporate entity trying to make money and so on. But you had shows like 60 Minutes which actually did have some really kind of important exposes on important Olympics. And now that's getting wiped out in favor of sit down interviews with Erica Kirk, on the other hand. And again, obviously I didn't watch it, but everything I've read indicates it was a different.

[B]

She endorsed J.D. vance, though. That's an important thing.

[A]

She's got Lotus on her mind. She's thinking, Nick, First Lady Erica Kirk, Right?

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

But what do you call advertisers just ran away from it. Apparently. From what I read it sounded like a QVC thing with the advertisers and the ratings were just a disaster. And I think one thing that nobody really takes into account, the Democratic Party never takes into account if you look at cultural or political issues. Americans aren't crazy Trump people, a lot of them are, but the majority of Americans aren't. Most Americans don't want to listen to Erica Kirk dribble on. And they don't want Tony Dukopoulos or whatever the hell his name is giving like Zionist news every night on cbs. Right. And so this can be interesting, these things. I don't know, I don't know. Like it's hard not to make money when you're in tv. That's why I thought the most hilarious part of the Colbert cancellation was that like they weren't making money. It's. Oh, come on, give me a break.

[B]

Obviously, but it was the number one late night show, TV show.

[A]

Yeah. And they tried to do the same to Jimmy Kimmel and people spoke out and it didn't take long for ABC to bail, to back off. And I think people don't understand if you can speak out in behalf of Jimmy Kimmel, you can speak out on behalf of like people being beaten up by ice wherever in a million different places. So I'm curious. Even though these people are like Ellis and Zuckerberg and Bezos and Musker, I think really malevolent, maybe demonic, but they're also like, want to make money and I don't know how that'll figure into all this, because they are, in a lot of ways, selling a product that a lot of people don't really give a shit about. How many people canceled the Washington Post subscriptions? Pretty big number.

[B]

It was a pretty big hit on the Washington Post.

[A]

And so I canceled mine.

[B]

I canceled mine.

[A]

Yeah, I don't get it anymore. And it's not like the biggest statement you can make. But the point is there's a lot of people who don't want to hear that. They're tired of it. Trump's not popular. Less popular every day. The problem is you don't have an opposition that's any more popular. Democrats are just as unpopular as Trump. But it's interesting, but yet this, and we've seen this in every industry, right? This kind of increasing corporatization. And fewer and fewer groups like Chomsky and Herman have written about this years ago. Ben Bagdeeki and so many people have.

[B]

Been writing about Robert Mitchesny.

[A]

The late Robert Mitches Mitchesney. Yeah, yeah. And we're clearly seeing that now where, like you said, the number of media companies used to be fairly significant and varied and now you've got like Sinclair and the big ones and it's consolidated in right wing culture. And which is why I think in a lot of ways social media is becoming more important, not just for communicating with other people, but like even I'm an old man and I get my news from Instagram and Twitter as much as anywhere else. Now if I want to find out what's going on, like in Gaza, I'm not going to go to CBS News or ABC News or the New York Times. Right. I'm going to go look at the video coming in from Gaza or ice, ICE attacks. You're not going to see. I can hear from the Democrats. Right. In the last, just the last few days, I've been sending you stuff. Right. The two most outspoken people on Venezuela are Republicans from Kentucky, Rand Paul and Thomas Massie. I'm seeing that on TikTok and Twitter. I'm not seeing that on the nightly news.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

Whereas in the 70s, along with like sitcoms like all in the Family, you did have anchors talking about what's happening in Vietnam or what was happening in civil rights or whatever.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, we've had such a shift and part of it, part not to get into this too much. It's, it's very much part of it. Part of it's this like, concentration of wealth, increased concentration of wealth, increased concentration of. Increased concentration of corporate power and, like, elite power. I was. As I was prepping for this today, I was thinking that all in the Family comes on the heels of opposition to the Vietnam War and civil rights and women's rights. But this sort of bigger thing, it comes on the heels of is this sort of massive growth of the middle class out of a lot of class struggle in the first half of the 20th century. And I. And it's part of who Archie is, too, as he comes out of that, too. But I do think that a lot of the progressive thought that we saw in the 1970s comes as a result that people are, like, more fluent, they're more educated, all of that. And with attacks, the ongoing attacks on the middle class, greater concentrations of wealth, and less and less attacks on, like, progressive institutions, progressive culture stuff, and in.

[A]

A way to bring it all back home. Mike Stevick is a grad student, right. Which at the time, in many ways was a vehicle to. To becoming part of the middle class. There's an old Bob Seeger song called umc, you know, upper middle class. And it's funny because one of the lines is, I want to be a lawyer. Doctor or professor. A member of the umc. Professor was up there with a doctor, lawyer, which obviously it wouldn't be anymore. But back then, education was your vehicle to. To do whatever, include get financially financial security, right? And now we're at the point where education is being deliberately destroyed. And you make fun of people like that, right? If you go to college now, the point. And that has shown this. I've seen polling all over the place, right? That confirms this, right? A lot of people now, more people go to college to get a good job and make money, whereas that's not what Rob. I'm sorry, Mike Stivic. Rob Reiner's doing, right. He's going there because he wants to. I don't know if they ever. Did they ever say what field he was in or whatever.

[B]

I feel like it was political science or something.

[A]

I think it was. It was one of the humanities. Now we laugh at people like that. And those departments are being like, actually, they're defunct in a lot of universities and you can't get student loans anymore. If you're in those fields, Trump just basically ban them, right?

[B]

And.

[A]

And so I think that's part of it as well, right? That whole. The kind of concept of what you're doing. Do you want to make a better society? How do you want to contribute this? Do you want to make life better? Now it's. You Want to make money? Like, how can you make more money?

[B]

I remember in the late 80s, I was in a class and the professor read the top prestigious jobs in America via a poll in the 1980s. Number one was Supreme Court justice and number two was professor. And I think doctor and lawyer was in there too. But just like looking at it for today, it's like doctor and lawyer are still in there, but like it's IT manager, like someone who works in tech or a CEO. CEOs were not as entrepreneurs. Yeah, exactly. Venture capital.

[A]

Whereas professors were the enemy now. Right. J.D. vance said so. Right?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

It's very different. And so all the Family really, for that period, for even the last of a decade, but it really created a lot of openings in American culture. People watch that show not because they liked Archie. They watched that show because it explored these themes and challenged Archie on it. I remember my dad didn't like all the Family because he thought Archie Bunker was a caricature. He's. We're not working class people aren't like that. We're not a bunch of like ignorant bigots. I was like, dad, some of them still are. But. But that was the whole point of it, right? That like, you shouldn't make a hero out of somebody like him. And Norman Lear, he was on Nixon's enemies list. So a lot of this really is his way of sticking it to Nixon and the right wing in the 60s and 70s.

[B]

Yeah, I'm gonna wrap it there unless you have anything else. We didn't wanna make this a show about Rob Reiner's career or anything like that, but we thought this was a more interesting thing to talk about as far as Rob Reiner goes. And so Rob Reiner presented a.

[A]

Liberals today were like Rob Reiner in the 70s, they'd be a lot more tolerable. They wouldn't be quite as insufferable.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. But if you like what you're hearing, and this is like one of our arts and culture episodes, and if you like what you hear, please check us out on Facebook, Instagram, at Twitter, @BluesK. If you're watching this on YouTube, hit the subscribe button. If you're watching this on. If you're listening to this on audio platform, give us a rating review. It helps us with the algorithms. And then if you really like us, especially since it's the end of the year, please consider giving us a [e-mail] by hitting that support button or becoming a [e-mail] greenredpodcast and we have hats, just hats and books for end of year. And we also have now gotten an order of certain days calendars. And so if for a donation of $25 or more, we will get you a calendar as well. I didn't bring them with me today, but please consider supporting the Green Red Podcast.

[A]

And I've just heard that the economy is doing great. It's like the best economy ever. It's a perfect economy, so you should have plenty of money.

[B]

It's the most amazing economy.

[A]

He promised everything and he's delivering even more.

[B]

Yeah. Where it was a. He inherited a mess.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And especially on the economy. And. And it's all fixed now. Tariffs, get rid of all those undocumented people.

[A]

I was tired of winning, but now I'm not anymore. Yeah. So I'm sure all of you got a lot of extra money out there. You can send some our way.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Keep the donate in Donald Trump's name, in fact.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Keep your friends at Green the Red Podcast in mind when you're getting all those big fat dividend checks from the government. Yeah. Until then, this is the Trump Green and Red Podcast, because he likes to put his name on everything. So we're just going to go ahead and preemptively acknowledge that, make trouble, misbehave, and we'll talk to you again soon.

[A]

Sam.