"All in the Family," is kind of like wishing for a little more frankness in political dialogue and getting your wish in the form of Spiro Agnew. A working-class family situation series with a message, "All in the Family" is vulgar and silly. And after the disgust-at-first-shock wears off, the vaudeville clinkers passed off as humor are totally predictable, both in themselves and as means of conveying the show's moral: All prejudice—racial, class, sophisticated against unsophisticated and vice versa—is bad.

It cannot even claim the shock value of being courageously, uncompromisingly, true to life. In an attempt to discredit stereotyping, it resorts to stereotypes. In its sledgehammer determination to tell it like it is, it over-tells, and, instead of being the breakthrough in courage it was meant to be, it over-kills itself.

Stephanie Harrington, "The Message Sounds Like 'Hate Thy Neighbor'," in The New York Times...