Oscar Winberg, "Archie Bunker for President: How One Television Show Remade American Politics" (UNC Press, 2025)

About this episode

Oscar Winberg discusses his book on how the sitcom All In The Family influenced American politics and media.

Political historian Oscar Winberg has a fascinating new book titled Archie Bunker for President: How One Television Show Remade American Politics. This book weaves together quite a few different threads in examining the historical context in which the television show, All In The Family, landed on American television screens. Archie Bunker for President examines why this particular sitcom was a kind of inflection point within U.S. politics, within the media landscape at the time and moving forward, and how television production shifted and changed around this one particular television series. Winberg also lays out the path from the early 1970s, when All in the Family first aired, to our contemporary political moment, when celebrity and politics seem to be inescapably intertwined. As Winberg notes in our conversation, television as an entity is inherently conservative, since the functional model was about appealing to the lowest common denominator so that advertisers would be willing to pay for time during shows. In order to reach the most viewers, at least in the age of network television, the television series needed to appeal to the largest market possible, and not “turn off”…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Oscar Winberg

Topics covered

• television history
• politics
• media influence
• sitcoms
• cultural analysis

Keywords

• Archie Bunker
• All In The Family
• politics
• television
• media landscape
• sitcom
• cultural impact

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: UNC Press

Books & works: Archie Bunker for President: How One Television Show Remade American Politics, All In The Family

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