“All in the Family” saturated American culture. It was a time when people found TV so dangerous they put warning signs on it. Illustration by Joanna Neborsky / Photographs from Everett

“The program you are about to see is ‘All in the Family.’ It seeks to 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.”

This nervous disclaimer, which was likely as powerful as a “Do not remove under penalty of law” tag on a mattress, ran over the opening credits of Norman Lear’s new sitcom. It was 1971, deep into the Vietnam War and an era of political art and outrage, but television was dominated by escapist fare like “Bewitched” and “Bonanza.” “All in the Family” was designed to explode the medium’s taboos, using an incendiary device named Archie Bunker. A Republican loading-dock worker living in Queens, Bunker railed from his easy chair against “coons” and “hebes,” “spics” and “fags.” He yelled at his wife and he screamed at his son-in-law, and even when he was quiet he was fuming about “the good old days.” He was also, as played by the remarkable Carroll O’Connor, very funny, a spray of malapropisms and sly illogic.

CBS arranged for extra operators to take complaints from offended viewers, but few came in—and by Season 2 “All in the Family” was TV’s biggest hit. It held the No. 1 spot for five years. At the show’s peak, sixty per cent of the viewing public were watching the series, more than fifty million viewers nationwide, every Saturday night. Lear became the original pugnacious showrunner, long before that term existed. He produced spinoff after spinoff (“cookies from my cookie cutter,” he described them to Playboy, in 1976), including “Maude” and “The Jeffersons,” which had their own mouthy curmudgeons. At the Emmys, Johnny Carson joked that Lear had optioned his own acceptance speech. A proud liberal, Lear had clear ideological aims for his creations: he wanted his shows to be funny, and he certainly wanted them to be hits, but he also wanted to purge prejudice by exposing it. By giving bigotry a human face, Lear believed, his show could help liberate American TV viewers. He hoped that audiences would embrace Archie but reject his beliefs.

Yet, as Saul Austerlitz explains in his smart new book, “Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes from ‘I Love Lucy’ to ‘Community,’ ” Lear’s most successful character managed to defy his creator, with a “Frankenstein”-like audacity. “A funny thing happened on the way to TV immortality: audiences liked Archie,” Austerlitz writes. “Not in an ironic way, not in a so-racist-he’s-funny way; Archie was TV royalty because fans saw him as one of their own.”

This sort of audience divide, not between those who love a show and those who hate it but between those who love it in very different ways, has become a familiar schism in the past fifteen years, during the rise of—oh, God, that phrase again—Golden Age television. This is particularly true of the much lauded stream of cable “dark dramas,” whose protagonists shimmer between the repulsive and the magnetic. As anyone who has ever read the comments on a recap can tell you, there has always been a less ambivalent way of regarding an antihero: as a hero. Some of the most passionate fans of “The Sopranos” fast-forwarded through Carmela and Dr. Melfi to freeze-frame Tony strangling a snitch with electrical wire. (David Chase satirized their bloodlust with a plot about “Cleaver,” a mob horror movie with all of the whackings, none of the Freud.) More recently, a subset of viewers cheered for Walter White on “Breaking Bad,” growling threats at anyone who nagged him to stop selling meth. In a blog post about that brilliant series, I labelled these viewers “bad fans,” and the responses I got made me feel as if I’d poured a bucket of oil onto a flame war from the parapets of my snobby critical castle. Truthfully, my haters had a point: who wants to hear that they’re watching something wrong?

But television’s original bad-fan crisis did not, as it happens, concern a criminal bad boy, or even take place on a drama. It involved Norman Lear’s right-wing icon, Archie Bunker, the loudmouthed buffoon who became one of TV’s most resonant and beloved television characters. Archie was the first masculine powerhouse to simultaneously charm and alienate viewers, and, much like the men who came after him, he longed for an era when “guys like us, we had it made.” O’Connor’s noisy, tender, and sometimes frightening performance made the character unforgettable, but from the beginning he was a source of huge anxiety, triggering as many think pieces as Lena Dunham. Archie represented the danger and the potential of television itself, its ability to influence viewers rather than merely help them kill time. Ironically, for a character so desperate to return to the past, he ended up steering the medium toward the future.

“All in the Family” began as a British show called “Till Death Do Us Part,” a hit comedy about Alf Garnett, a Cockney xenophobe who had a sharptongued wife, a hip daughter, and a socialist son-in-law. The show, which first aired in 1965, was a ratings hit, spawning catchphrases (“You silly moo”) and mass British identification with Garnett—a response that troubled the show’s creator, Johnny Speight, even as he made the case for its pungent zingers. “To make him truthful, he’s got to say those things, and they are nasty things,” Speight argued.

By 1967, Norman Lear, a Second World War veteran who never finished college, had spent years cutting a path through show biz. As recounted in “Archie & Edith, Mike & Gloria,” by Donna McCrohan, he began by collecting gossip tips, ghostwrote syndicated columns, and then jumped into comedy, having scammed his way into the office of the comedy bigwig Danny Thomas by pretending to be a reporter. After a successful stretch working on nineteen-fifties showcases, including “The Martha Raye Show,” he teamed up with the producer Bud Yorkin. The two became industry machers, packaging TV specials and making movies, such as “Divorce American Style.” When Lear read about “Till Death” in Variety, he felt a stab of identification. His father, Herman Lear, a Jewish salesman from Connecticut, was a “rascal,” in Norman’s words, who went to prison when Norman was nine, convicted of shady dealings; like Alf Garnett, he was at once loving and bigoted. Lear bought the rights to Speight’s show, without ever having seen it, and hammered out a treatment. He gave Archie one of his own father’s favorite insults for him—“you meathead, dead from the neck up”—and Archie, like Herman Lear, called his wife a “dingbat” and demanded that she “stifle.” It’s the origin story of nearly every breakthrough sitcom, as recounted in Austerlitz’s book: memoir mined for a resonant, replicable pattern—in this case, the clash between the Greatest Generation and the emerging Baby Boomers, embodied by Archie Bunker and Michael (Meathead) Stivic, his son-in-law.

ABC was interested, but the network was concerned about the show’s raw language. For the next two years, the executives and Lear went through an elaborate production process, taping two pilots—the first in September, 1968, titled “Justice for All” (Archie’s last name was originally Justice), the second in February of the following year, called “Those Were the Days.” Lear wanted to cast Mickey Rooney as the lead, but the actor thought it was too risky. (Rooney did offer to make a different show: “Listen to this—Vietnam vet. Short. Blind. Private eye. Large dog!”) So Lear offered the part to O’Connor, an Irish-American actor whose rare mixture of “bombast and sweetness” he described to reporters as being ideal for the role. Lear cast Jean Stapleton as Edith, who transformed the British show’s battle-axe—she resembled the tart-tongued Alice, of “The Honeymooners”—into a figure of genuine pathos, a quavery-voiced housewife whose tenderness cut through the show’s anger, and who gradually became its voice of reason.