Many years ago, I watched some interviews with the writers of the smash hit TV show from the 70’s:
“All In The Family”
Specifically, they were talking about the main character Archie Bunker.
None of them agreed with Archie’s politics, nor did the actor who played him, Carroll O’Connor. Normal Lear, the producer, certainly didn’t agree with him. And we all know the late Rob Reiner didn’t. Archie was, from what I can tell, created to be someone you did NOT like, agree with, or root for.
Not unlike Alan Moore’s character in “Watchmen” Rorschach.
Alan, to this day, has contempt for his own fans for liking that character.
He created that character to be hated only for his fans to love and identify with him.
But back to Archie:
The writers and the actor made Archie so relatable, so lovable, and so watched by the entire country… he took on a real life persona of his own. And the audience all grew a very real relationship with Archie and his family each week, making it one of the “most watched” TV shows of all time.
What’s ironic though is how they were always trying to “foil” Archie.
They tried making him the bad guy, and a buffoon, and a jerk.
But all they really did was make millions of viewers – right or left – root for him more. In fact, from what I understand, the show ultimately created more Republicans than Democrats and the rise of Ronald Reagan.
As for writing the character?
The writers all admitted Archie wrote himself.
They rarely struggled with or wondered what Archie was going to say or how he was going to react after the first season or two.
On a side note:
I used to sneak out of my room and watch that show late at night, when I was in middle school. It was on back-to-back from 10:30 to 11:30 pm and I never missed an episode. Decades later after Willis was a newborn, I hummed the show’s theme song to him to sooth him. He also “heard” it in the womb when Stefania and I watched the show while she was pregnant.
Today Willis still makes me hum the show’s theme song before bed.
Anyway, it’s a fascinating lesson about the power of storytelling unto itself.
But clicking back over to the show:
If you ever saw it, Archie is so fleshed out it’s like you “know” him.
You may not know what he’s going to say.
But you’re probably not surprised by whatever it is he does say, because he was just so well-crafted & written. I doubt the writers exaggerated at all about how his lines wrote themselves. Because he was so in embedded in their own minds, in their own subconscious, and, I’d argue, also in America’s subconscious.
I don’t know what this phenomenon is called officially.
So I just call it:
“The Archie Bunker Effect”
And that’s when you’re so “in tune” with the character you’re writing that those characters take a life of their own. They do and say things on their own. They also make decisions – often bad and even ridiculously stupid decision, like most humans – on their own.
It’s almost like you’re just there witnessing it, and you just happen to be writing it down.
I’ve experienced this phenomenon several times in my own writing.
And it’s quite surreal, to say the least.
In fiction, it took me 8 novels to finally get to that point where my characters wrote themselves, with me as spectator, just as interested to see what they’d say or do as any other reader.
And in copywriting, it was even more intense.
I still have old clients “living” in my psyche to this day.
Not so much because I got into their heads, but they got into mine.
Some of them even became characters in my novels later on.
My Fezziwig character, in my Enoch Wars series, is absolutely heavily influenced by a crotchety, salty, old grizzled guy whose product I sold, and I still can’t get him out of my head.
And I can tell you, it made all the difference in my sales.
Just like Archie (the show was “about” him not the family) did in its ratings.
There is a lot of money to be found in using the Archie Bunker Effect.
I’ve used it to sell in all kinds of markets – from business related offers, to consumer niches like female weight loss (where I became like a “cross dressing copywriter” so to speak, writing AS a woman), self defense, golf, etc.
And I know of very few writers who understand it, much less can teach it.
Especially in the realms of copywriting and direct response marketing.
All right that’s that for now.
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Ben Settle
