All In Our Family
...my sister and I watched EVERY episode of 'All in the Family' together with my dad, he on the couch and us stretched out on the floor in front of the only color television.
The show wasn't actually the basis for a generational or societal discussion like the critics have done for decades now. It gifted us with its own narrative and soundtrack for the edification of parents or youth watching.
At least that's the way it was in our suburban family, with my sister and I fully absorbed in the post-hippie culture of the seventies, and my parents relics of the valedictorian order of their salad days in the 40's and 50's which forced them to quickly shed the uniform and buttoned-down precepts which they had only just accepted and adopted as their own.
Dad would come home from work and take off his suit and tie and put on another suit and tie to go shopping, sans the hat that never left the hatbox after we moved to the relative informality of the suburbs to the city life that defined his coming of age into the world of business and government.
We weren't a particularly politically oriented family, outside of the necessary attention that upwardly-mobile black professionals gave to the politics that determined rights and opportunity; federal government action and protections indeed a major influence in my parent's professional success.
On vacation, and almost out the door to the beach one summer, Richard Nixon was on the motel television resigning the presidency and I had to practically beg them to stop and watch.
But while those political events weren't the actual flashpoints of our family's generational divides, there was an over-current of resistance to permissiveness against our natural drive for free expression and anti-authoritarianism which took advantage of those events as markers of our individual identities.
Conservative and liberal ideals were certainly attached to important political initiatives and events, but in our family they were mostly just abstractions; undercurrents to the everyday clashes between young and old.
We didn't actually talk about the episodes of AITF we watched; didn't really comment on what was said. It wasn't that kind of relationship. What we got from the constant debates between 'Meathead' and Archie was a subversive means of introducing subjects and ideas into each others minds and psyches without saying a word.
It was like when we'd be in the car and 'Signs' would come on the radio, or Jonathan Edwards singing 'Sunshine; as we turned the sound up loud for Dad to take it all in:
"Some man's gone, he's tried to run my life
He don't know what he's asking
When he tells me I better get in line
I can't hear what he's saying
When I grow up, I'm gonna make it mine
These ain't dues I been paying..." 
Watching those staged debates didn't elicit any open confessions of support or belief from any of us watching other than a revealing laugh or groan, or maybe a frown acknowledging that the message had been received and processed, all for better or for worse.
The brilliant writing by Lear and others exposed flaws in the zealous politics expressed on both sides of the Bunker living room; generating grudged understanding of each other, and informing us of contradictions in some of our own reasoning that we used to deliberately divide ourselves, as well.
I think we all lost some of the edge of our own projections against each other when actually faced with their others' probable beliefs. It possibly defined for us what we believed in ways that didn't just cast our opponents as enemies, but as family members who may disagree.
So, it wasn't at all surprising that Rob Reiner grew into a man so resembling of the character he played, with all of the principle and values that we used as a representation of our own social awakening, against the stubbornness of our parents' generation in accepting change; a stoic alternative to blind patriotism, warmongering, and vulture capitalism.
When we couldn't, or wouldn't express those truths to each other, Rob said them for us for our own edification; and boy, he would get right under their skin. 
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...I saw Jonathan Edwards in Georgetown on the canal on my birthday, and then surprised him at a restaurant appearance later that evening.
I thought he'd be amused, at least, but his face took on the look of someone being accosted by their stalker when I went up to talk to him after the show.
Never stalk your heroes?