Classic 1970s TV Shows That Could Ignite Debate in Today’s Society

This transformation is perhaps most vividly captured in television and film, as popular media often mirrors societal norms of its era. TV shows that captivated audiences during the ’70s would likely face a different reception today, with some potentially never making it onto future streaming platforms. While these classics remain cherished, their outdated portrayals highlight how far we’ve come, even as they secure their place among the best shows of that decade.

When “Charlie’s Angels” premiered on ABC in 1976, American women had only recently gained the ability to obtain credit cards independently, just two years prior. Starring Jaclyn Smith, Farrah Fawcett, and Kate Jackson, the show followed three private investigators over 109 episodes until 1981. Emerging during the height of the second-wave feminist movement, the series’ depiction of skilled and self-reliant female leads could have been a symbol of pride for advocates of gender equality.

The 21st-century revivals of the franchise did not fare much better. The films released in 2000 and 2003 performed well at the box office but failed to impress critics, and a 2011 TV reboot was short-lived, lasting only eight episodes. A third cinematic attempt in 2019, helmed by Elizabeth Banks, proved to be a significant box office disappointment despite featuring a star-studded cast.

Instead, the Angels worked at the behest of the mysterious John Bosley (David Doyle) and dressed in revealing outfits, even while working. “Charlie’s Angels” is perhaps the best illustration of how societal evolution has rendered a once-popular show so cringeworthy that it’s almost unwatchable today. Olivia Rutigliano of Crime Reads called the series “a portrayal of tremendous female independence, capability, and power that was simultaneously loaded with objectification and sexualization.” She also quoted New York Times film critic Molly Haskell’s observation that women in the media “who were doing the agitating and analyzing didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.” 

The 21st century extensions of the franchise weren’t much better. The 2000 film and its 2003 sequel did well at the box office but weren’t loved by critics, and a 2011 TV reboot lasted just eight episodes. A third film in 2019 written and directed by Elizabeth Banks was a huge box office flop despite a star-studded cast.

The premise of “Three’s Company” was as preposterous in 1977 as it would be now, but the show’s three stars were so effective that audiences couldn’t help but love it. John Ritter plays Jack Tripper, who pretends to be gay so he can share an apartment with Janet (Joyce De Witt) and Chrissy (Suzanne Somers) without prompting gossip from the neighbors or goofy apartment manager Ralph Furley (Don Knotts).

We’ve come much further with LGBTQ+ representation, as the hackneyed gay jokes made by Jack and at his expense have aged like a vat of raw milk. His portrayal of a straight man pretending to be gay leaned heavily on stereotypes like floppy wrists and a heavy lisp, but author Michael Montlack — who was a closeted gay man when the show aired — argued that flawed representation was better than none at all. 

Montlack wrote in The Advocate that Jack Tripper’s behavior was “not completely unfamiliar to a boy pretending to be straight in order to live peacefully in an unwelcoming world.” He added that “Jack was there — a real presence in my living room week after week — pretending to be something so foreign yet so natural to me, and informing me (no, us!) that we did in fact exist and could even find cozy homes for ourselves … Suddenly I knew: I’d find my place in this world.”

“All in the Family’s” Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) was already a a relic in his day. His regressive attitudes about people of color and other marginalized groups were already being challenged in the real world. Archie was prejudiced toward seemingly everyone but his wife Edith (Jean Stapleton) and daughter Gloria (Sally Struthers), but Gloria’s husband Michael Stivic (Rob Reiner) was the constant butt of slurs and barbs related to his Polish heritage. Archie was outwardly friendlier to his black neighbors the Jeffersons while stereotyping their family behind closed doors. But while Bunker spread his hostility around like butter on toast, O’Connor was far more open-minded off-camera.

In an interview with the Television Academy, O’Connor explained how Archie Bunker served as a cautionary tale to viewers who saw themselves in the character. “That was Archie, [with] all his preconceptions keeping him from enjoying life. That was my message; Archie never enjoyed anything. He came in the house, he never smiled, never had anything nice to say about the day … The poison was from inside of himself, and his father had passed it on to him.” In its final season, O’Connor and Struthers took home individual Emmy awards, and the show itself won several Emmys over its run for best comedy series. The “All in the Family” universe grew to more than a half-dozen shows including the spinoff “The Jeffersons.” 

M*A*S*H was one of the most popular shows of its time. The 1983 finale was viewed in more than 60% of American homes and included a heartbreaking scene with Alan Alda’s Captain Hawkeye Pierce that some felt went too far. The prior installments starred Alda alongside a changing cast that included Harry Morgan, Wayne Rogers, Jamie Farr, Gary Burghoff, and Loretta Swit. Despite its wartime setting, M*A*S*H was short on explicit gore, but still leaned heavily into the ongoing trauma suffered by veterans.

Major Houlihan (Swit) exhibited similar contradictions as Charlie’s three angels: she was respected for being great at her job but her nickname “Hot Lips” reflected how she was sexualized by the all-male surgical staff. In a 2023 interview with Fox News Swit said the nickname was an “insult” and noted that Margaret Houlihan “wasn’t just a piece of anatomy. She was a major in the United States Army, and she should not be disrespected … I kept telling the writers, ‘She’s so much more than this.’” 

In his column about “M*A*S*H” for Observer, millennial viewer Jake Flores called the show “problematic,” stating “What starts off as a gripping medical drama turns into a salacious boy’s club of misogynistic remarks and down-punching bro humor.” In addition, the overwhelmingly white cast featured only one Black surgeon with Capt. Oliver Harmon (Timothy Brown), who appeared in only six episodes and was given an openly racist nickname we’re not going to repeat.

The Confederate flag on the roof of the General Lee might be enough to keep “The Dukes of Hazzard” off the air today. Premiering in 1979, there was plenty of casual racism and stereotypes of southerners that seem like relics after decades of progress. John Schneider and Tom Wopat starred as brothers Bo and Luke Duke respectively, who lived with their uncle Jesse (Denver Pyle) and cousin Daisy (Catherine Bach). The car was the true star, though; the Dukes drove the orange Dodge Charger through roadblocks and barns, jumped it on ad-hoc earthen ramps, and used the always-open windows for entry because the doors were welded shut.

TV Land removed reruns of the series in 2015 amidst growing public condemnation for Confederate imagery, and Warner Brothers stopped licensing models of the car with the flag emblem. You can still stream “The Dukes of Hazzard on Amazon Prime Video though, rooftop flag and all. Schneider railed against the move to The Hollywood Reporter, dismissing it as misguided. “Throwing this particular baby out with the bathwater seems reactionary and overly PC to me,” he said. “If the flag was a symbol of racism, then Bo and Luke and Daisy and Uncle Jesse were a pack of wild racists, and that could not be further from the truth.” It’s hard to know for sure, since there weren’t a whole lot of people of color on the show to begin with.

It’s much easier to see the ingrained racism in “Kung Fu,” the series that ran from 1972 through 1975 and starred David Carradine as martial arts master Kwai Chang Caine. In 2019, Complex ranked “Kung Fu” the 19th most racist show of all time, calling out Carradine’s casting and “his character’s penchant for spouting weird fortune-cookie-style aphorisms like ‘Become who you are.’” Showrunners are now more conscious about casting actors of color in similar roles. In 2021, the series was rebooted starring Olivia Liang, Kheng Hua Tan, and Eddie Liu.

But as with “Three’s Company,” some feel that, in hindsight, the original series’ misguided representation of Asians on mainstream TV was better than no representation at all. Christina M. Kim — who created the reboot — acknowledged the original as “groundbreaking for what it was when it aired” when speaking with Variety. She added that it was important that “whoever we cast was Asian and that this role encompassed not just her, but [also] her family to give a full cast of characters that were Asian American.”

“Sanford and Son” star Redd Foxx pushed boundaries as a stand-up comedian, and his grumpy Los Angeles-based screen persona Fred Sanford was like a bizarro mirror image of Archie Bunker. Sanford was equally irascible, although he lived on the opposite coast of a nation still adjusting to the Civil Rights Act and racial integration of public schools.

Foxx and Demond Wilson, the latter being among the actors who died in 2026, were the only two to appear in all 135 episodes. Wilson played Fred’s titular son Lamont. There was plenty of controversy around the series in its day. In 2011, Foxx biographer Michael Starr told CBS, “This was an African-American show built around a largely African-American cast, (and it) shot almost to (number) one or two (in the ratings) at soon as it premiered. And it was a little controversial, because even some people in the African-American community felt it wasn’t a fair portrayal.” 

Foxx might be allowed to be more uncensored today, but his racist jokes at the expense of Asian character Ah Chew (Pat Morita) wouldn’t fly two inches. In an email to Florida NBC affiliate WPTV, series creator Norman Lear, who also created “All in the Family,” acknowledged the spiritual link between Archie Bunker and Fred Sanford. “We didn’t compare [the two shows], but the characters called it like they saw it in their own neighborhoods,” Lear wrote. 

Only the first two seasons of “Taxi” aired in the ’70s, with the show running from 1978 to 1983. It starred Danny DeVito as the dispatcher of a New York cab company and Judd Hirsch, Tony Danza, and Marilu Henner as three of his drivers. It’s much-loved even to this day despite its stereotypical portrayals of Italian-American and Jewish New Yorkers, and absence of non-white characters. Henner’s Elaine Nardo appeared in all 114 episodes and, although often pushed to the side, she wasn’t subjected to the persistent sexualization Margaret Houlihan faced on “M*A*S*H.” 

Immigrant company mechanic Latka Gravas (Andy Kaufman) is stereotyped as a babbling simpleton, while cabbie Jim Ignatowski (Christoper Lloyd) was reduced to a mumbling mess after taking a tiny bite of a pot brownie many years before the events of the show. About 38% of the current population was born in another country, cannabis is legal across the state, and the city was much grittier than it is now. The lack of non-white characters also makes New York seem more like Nebraska or Idaho than one of the nation’s most diverse cities.

“Chico and the Man” premiered in 1974 and was the third-highest rated show in its first season behind “All in the Family” and “Sanford & Son.” “Chico and the Man” starred Freddie Prinze as Chico Rodriguez, a young Vietnam veteran who works at an East L.A. gas station and garage owned by the crabby and closed-minded Ed Brown (Jack Albertson). The series sparked protests from Latino advocacy groups who objected to the half Hungarian half Puerto Rican Prinze portraying a Mexican-American. His New York accent and Puerto Rican dialect made his casting hard to believe for Latin Americans, and calling him “Chico” (Spanish for boy) and his white savior/boss “The Man” also drew objections.

The show is rife with outdated stereotypes, and Ed shared Archie Bunker’s tendency to use slurs against anyone he did not identify with. Series creator James Komack was inspired by a short story by Ray Andrade, who was writing from personal experience as a young man who befriended a gym owner, similarly to Chico and Ed. The show did a course correction early on based on some of the criticism, and Ed became less objectionable as the series wore on. It never got the chance to run its natural course, though: Prinze died by suicide in 1977, and the last episode would air the following year.

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“Welcome Back, Kotter” is another show that stirred up controversy during its original run. It starred Gabe Kaplan as Gabe Kotter, a Brooklyn native who returns to his old high school as a teacher. Mr. Kotter is put in a classroom with an unruly bunch known as the Sweathogs led by Vinnie Barbarino (John Travolta). Vinnie is a walking Italian-American stereotype, and the portrayal of his Jewish/Puerto Rican buddy Epstein (Robert Heyges) was equally stock. The only Black sweathog was Freddie “Boom-Boom” Washington (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), who was more concerned with basketball and his hair than Mr. Kotter’s classroom.

The show was controversial in its time because public school integration was still a work in progress, and Boston’s ABC affiliate didn’t air some early episodes because of the ongoing debate. The ethnic and racial stereotyping in “Welcome Back, Kotter” would be unwelcome in modern times; a similar premise today would require more well-rounded depictions of the Sweathogs. Lumping young men from marginalized groups together in a band of so-called “delinquents” also lands poorly, especially since none of the teenagers were particularly dangerous (except to the learning process). A number of the main actors from “Welcome Back, Kotter” are still alive, and Travolta used the show as a springboard to starring roles in hit films like “Saturday Night Fever” and “Grease.”