Michael Stivic
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Michael "Meathead" Stivic was a character on the classic 1970s American sitcom All in the Family, played by actor Rob Reiner. Mike was usually at odds with his conservative father-in-law, Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O'Connor).
The character was an Americanized version of the British original: Til Death Us Do Part's Mike, the Trotskyist "randy Scouse git" who aroused the passionate ire of his arch-conservative father-in-law Alf Garnett. For the American version of this character, the Trotskyist angle was drastically softened, and Michael Stivic became a well-intentioned but sometimes naïve and self righteous liberal from a Polish-American background.
Exacerbating the conflicts between the perpetually unemployed graduate student Michael and his uneducated, bigoted but hard-working father-in-law Archie, was the fact that for much of the television series, these two characters lived under the same roof. This proximity meant that the tension between these seemingly diametrically opposed people resulted in hilarious arguments over the simplest of topics.
As the character of Michael Stivic developed, however, it became clear that he and Archie were not entirely dissimilar. Just as Archie Bunker was clearly a satire of arch-conservative attitudes, within the context of the show Michael's character made possible a critique of the limits of liberalism, especially in the sex-based hierarchy of marriage. Michael's treatment of his wife Gloria (played by Sally Struthers) was repeatedly called to account for his sense of superiority over her. This meant that as much as the conflicts between Archie and Michael represented conflicts between "modern" liberalism and "old-fashioned" conservatism, the conflicts between the Stivics also served to illuminate the close similarities between the liberal patriarch, Michael, and the conservative patriarch, Archie. All these themes were carried over from Till Death Us Do Part.
In episode #58, "Everyone tells the Truth", Archie and Michael are shown to be alike in that both of them are not above twisting the truth to suit their own racial stereotypes of other persons.
The character of Michael Stivic did not appear in the 1982 spin-off series Gloria, which starred Struthers. It was explained that Michael had left his wife and young son to live on a commune with a flower child in California.
[edit] Meathead
Archie routinely referred to Michael as "Meathead". The term "Meathead", would not only become synonymous with the Mike Stivic character, but a pop culture reference as well. Indeed, Reiner has stated that "I could win the Nobel Prize and they’d write 'Meathead wins the Nobel Prize.' " [1]
An episode of All in the Family reveals that Archie Bunker himself was referred to as "Meathead" when he was younger.
