Dial File: A trip back to Archie's America

Listen, Meathead -- all your hebes, your spics, your wops, your chinks, your micks, your fruits and your jungle bunnies are killing this country for us regular Americans.

I miss that show. You don't? Stifle, dingbat.

Why? Because with a flourish of Archie's flushing toilet, "All in the Family" triumphantly returns to prime-time on cable's TV Land on Oct. 19, preceded by a weeklong marathon of episodes on sister channel Nick-at-Nite, starting Monday. If you don't watch, you really are a Meathead. Or, in Archie-speak: "MEAT-HEAD -- dead from the neck up."

"All in the Family" changed sitcoms. The pity is that they've changed back.

Even more pitiful: Contrast the commotion over "All in the Family" in the '70s with its '98 controversy counterpart, UPN's "The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer." (The "P" is not silent, which is meant to be Pfunny.)

What a Pfarce.

In a TV season with all the kick of an arthritic, three-legged mule, the lone rabble-rouser is "Pfeiffer," a wince-worthy waste about a black nobleman who becomes President Abraham Lincoln's manservant. Black leaders blasted the series for "trivializing the suffering and pain of African-American people during the period of slavery."

Never mind that the subject of slavery is barely broached, buried under an avalanche of sophomoric sex snickers. Or that Desmond, played by Chi McBride, is the series' sharpest, savviest character, and that includes the Great Emancipator (Dann Florek) himself. Or that "Pfeiffer" doesn't have an iota of interest in seriously addressing through comedic means -- "All in the Family's" fame -- any questions of race or prejudice in either historical, literal or metaphorical terms.

This is the level of socio-political debate that TV stirs as we knock on millennium's door? Well, perhaps that's appropriate now that political scandal has shifted from Tricky Dick's Watergate to Slick Willy's Zippergate, and a show about "nothing" was the national obsession of the '90s.

Me? Gimme Nixon. And Archie. And something.

And yet there is a curious comfort in the consistency of TV to unerringly reflect the times.

With its harsh, heated hysterics -- and taste for topicality -- "All in the Family" caught the cultural zeitgeist of a confrontational country when it debuted on Jan. 12, 1971. Vietnam, feminism, Nixon, draft-dodging, Kent State -- we were a conflicted bunch, in a conflicted mood. Archie vs. Mike? America vs. itself.

Other '70s shows embodied an embattled era one controversy at a time in their own camouflaged ways -- the gentle feminism of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," the sardonic anti-war angst of "M*A*S*H," the laugh-leavened racial reflections of "Good Times" and "The Jeffersons" (both spinoffs traceable to "All in the Family").

But "All in the Family" gobbled up all of their separate ideological intentions and spit 'em out in one giant gob -- with none of the sugar-coating that sitcoms often use to soft-sell their politics.

(You don't think sitcoms are political? They're the most political shows on television. We Americans, producers theorize, can only swallow our ideological medicine from idealistic Hollywood if it's buried deep within a laugh track -- sort of like trying to give the family dog a pill by tucking it in a slab of meat. Drama, straightforward and downbeat by definition, has never been the preferred method of political persuasion on TV.)

And now? Well, when "All in the Family" debuted, it carried this disclaimer: "This show will throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to show, in a mature fashion, just how absurd they are."

What sitcom sets that standard today? "Dharma and Greg"?

As authors Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh put it in "The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows," their encyclopedic guide to television: " 'All in the Family' changed the course of television comedy. It brought a sense of harsh reality to a TV world which previously had been populated largely by homogenized, inoffensive characters and stories that seemed to have been laundered before they ever got on the air."

Despite the coarsening of the prime-time vocabulary -- which "All in the Family" certainly jump-started, but at least its ethnic slurs served a larger purpose, as opposed to today's juvenile repetition of "ass" and other slang -- much of the network's current crop could easily fit that pre- "All in the Family" definition. In the currency of relevancy -- where the medium's real worth lies -- series TV is largely bankrupt.

"All in the Family" was raw, in your face, nose to nose, spit-in-your-eye TV.

But we don't spit in each other's eye anymore. We yawn in each other's face. Anger morphed into apathy. Nixon morphed into Clinton. Vietnam morphed into Monica Lewinsky.

And hot-button TV morphed from "All in the Family" to "The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer."

Archie may have been onto something. What a bunch of dingbats.

Croon a Tune: All Hail King "Rat" -- a k a Peter Green -- the first Dial Filer to croon last week's tune, the theme to "The Rat Patrol." Thanks for being on Patrol, Petey. Other pack Rats who marched in step were: Obert Brinley, Joe Lacy, Phil O'Leary, John Paine, Mark Ritchie and Dan Ryan. (What, no female Rats? Rats!) For another tune to croon, dial Dial File at 259-4012 (it will pick up after four rings) and lend an ear, dear.

Play us out, Maestro: With the journalistically frightening motto "Gossip is just another word for news," the "National Enquirer" TV show is set for a syndicated launch next fall. Adjustments must be made to the TV pecking order.

"Hard Copy" will be renamed "60 Minutes By Comparison."

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