All in the Family vs. Modern Family

I approached this blog post knowing that I was going to write it comparing All in the Family to the Emmy Award-winning Modern Family, but as one of the last to write my post, I saw that a ton of people on our sections blogroll made the same comparison. I spent a while trying to draw comparisons to some of my other favorite shows (Mad Men, Lost, 30 Rock, etc.), but I realized that Modern Family really is the best (and probably the easiest) example. 

Modern Family and All in the Family are similar in that they deal with multiple generations of one family and how they interact with one another. They are both sitcoms that revolve around the family's daily life. They are different in that Modern Family is, well, modern and also tends to skew more toward ridiculous shenanigans, while All in the Family is more grounded (and, of course, set in the 1970s). Modern Family seems to represent a slightly more upper class family, while All in the Family is firmly based on a typical middle/working class family. Also, one of the sub-families of the larger family in Modern Family is a gay couple and their daughter.

Through the gay couple and their daughter, Modern Family presents many issues relevant to gay people in America today. The episode of All in the Family we watched in class dealt with the issue of how others view gay people through Archie and his discrimination towards their "la-di-da" ways. Now, while ahead of its time, I felt that this episode of All in the Family represented the issue very poorly. By making the protagonist the one with the views the audience is supposed to question, this makes it seem as though they are the views the creators of the show support. Also, the presence of a studio audience who laughed at almost every derogatory comment made by Archie about gays made the whole thing seem like a joke at the expense of gay people. Modern Family deals with gay issues in a much more (again, the show is aptly named) modern way. By making the gay characters protagonists,  it presents their views in a much better light for acceptance by the viewing public.