Norman Lear did something in 1971 that no network executive would permit today: he put a bigot in a living room chair and dared America to recognize itself. “All in the Family” premiered to confusion, outrage, and then unprecedented ratings, because Lear understood that comedy’s sharpest instrument is discomfort. Archie Bunker worked because he was allowed to be wrong in specific, recognizable, unredacted ways. The audience had to do the moral labor of sorting the joke from the injury. That transaction between screen and viewer, that demand that the audience participate in meaning rather than consume a pre-digested emotional product, defined what the American sitcom could be at its most ambitious. Fifty-five years later, the form has abandoned that ambition with an enthusiasm that borders on institutional policy.

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