75. "Edith's Accident," All in the Family (1971)
Welcome to the “100 Best Sitcom Episodes of All Time,” a countdown for winter 2012. Each episode will get a separate blog post, counting backward toward No. 1. A list of the programs revealed so far is here and an introduction to the project is here.
In 1979, All in the Family producer Norman Lear tried to reinvent the sitcom again with The Baxters, a half-hour divided into two segments. In the first, the middle-class Baxter family dealt with some moral issue (putting a parent in a nursing home, reacting to a gay schoolteacher, etc.); in the second half, the studio audience voiced their opinions about what they had just seen. The show was a logical successor to All in the Family but a superfluous one. Undoubtedly, viewers were already talking about the decisions made by characters on Lear sitcoms (which also included Maude, Good Times, and the soap opera parody Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman), and they didn't need a Mr. Rogers-type moderator to get them started.
"Edith's Accident" is a relatively straightforward "What would you do?" episode, elevated by Jean Stapleton's hilariously anguished performance as Edith. At the start of the episode she reveals, in typically rambling fashion, that she's accidentally dented a stranger's car with a can of "cling peaches in heavy syrup" (changed midstory to "mmm mmm in heavy syrup" after an impatient Archie forbids her from mentioning the fruit again) that bounced out of her shopping cart. "It was a freak accident," she helpfully points out to Archie.
