Archie Bunker, Pa Ingalls, and the TV Dads Who Ruled the 1970s
What To Know
- 1970s TV featured a diverse range of iconic dads.
- Norman Lear’s sitcoms introduced audiences to dads from various backgrounds.
- Classic family values were also represented by characters like Howard Cunningham on Happy Days, Mike Brady on The Brady Bunch, and Charles Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie.
In the 1970s, you could take your pick of the two most realistic dads ever to surface on TV: John Walton (Ralph Waite) of The Waltons, who held together a large family during the Depression years with calm forbearance and tolerance for all, and his polar opposite, the beleaguered Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) of Norman Lear‘s groundbreaking All in the Family.
Everyone who saw Archie knew someone like him — cantankerous, spewing polarizing nonsense in impotent rage against a changing society — but we’d never seen his like on TV, and certainly not with such insight into a complicated character. You could hate what came out of his mouth, but there was no doubting his love for adult daughter Gloria (Sally Struthers).
Diversity was key to the Lear comedy factory, which produced such disparate dads as James Evans (John Amos) of Good Times, set in the Chicago projects; tightly wound George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) of The Jeffersons; and blustery Fred G. Sanford (Redd Foxx), the flip side of Archie, in the hit Sanford & Son, long before The Cosby Show revived the sitcom genre in the 1980s.
Everett Collection
Those wishing for simpler times got their wish when Happy Days brought the 1950s back with Mr. C, a.k.a. the avuncular Howard Cunningham (Tom Bosley), always beaming benignly at the antics of Richie (Ron Howard, grown up since his Opie days) and the Fonz (Henry Winkler). And while the blended family of The Brady Bunch was set in the present, their squeaky-clean demeanor was for the ages, and Robert Reed as Mike Brady was as dependable and square (and square-jawed) as they come.
Frontier fathers
These are the TV dads we often think of when harking back to so-called family values. But the tradition goes back even further, to the frontier of the 1800s on the long-running Western Bonanza (1959-73). Ben Cartwright (Lorne Greene) made his homestead on the Nevada range on the Ponderosa ranch with sons Adam (Pernell Roberts), Hoss (Dan Blocker) and Little Joe (Michael Landon) — each born to a different late mother (the Wild West wasn’t friendly to wives and mothers at the time). A patriarch for the ages, Ben ruled with an iron but fair fist.
NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images
Landon, propelled to superstardom as Little Joe, graduated to fatherhood a year after Bonanza ended by becoming Laura Ingalls’ (Melissa Gilbert) tireless “Pa,” Charles Ingalls, on Little House on the Prairie, set in late 19th-century Minnesota. Landon not only starred, but also wrote, directed, and produced the series, putting his personal stamp on this most iconic of pioneer fathers.
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This article originally ran in the June 2020 Best TV Dads issue of ReMIND Magazine. You can purchase it at the link below.
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