Rewatch: The first time we met George Jefferson

Fifty years ago Friday, just before 8:30 p.m., one of the iconic characters of TV history arrived through the Bunkers front door at 704 Hauser St., to the accompaniment of Archie's (Carroll O'Connor) triumphant cackle:

"Aha, you're in!"

" … I'm out," said George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) who slammed the door behind him, then barked at his longtime nemesis, "don't turn your back on me."

George was at long last in, and how.

Who exactly was this mysterious George? Viewers of "All in the Family'' had known of him since series launch in 1971, and had occasionally heard his voice off screen (albeit not Hemsley's).

Husband of Louise (Isabel Sanford), father of Lionel (Mike Evans), brother of Henry (Mel Stewart), all neighbors of the Bunker, George had refused to so much as acknowledge Archie, the neighborhood bigot, whose racist malaprops were regularly (and gleefully) flamed by Henry and Lionel.

It would take a special occasion to get George through that front door which finally arrived on the long-ago episode "Henry's Farewell" (Oct. 20, 1973). In a small gathering in the Bunkers' living room, Archie offered to toast Henry, who was moving upstate to start his own dry cleaning business. When George learned of Archie's uncharacteristically generous gesture, he demanded to make the toast instead.

How George was launched on "All in the Family" is well-established (about 40 million people did witness this, after all); how Hemsley got the part is a story of kismet and outrageous fortune — especially for any Black actor circa 1973.

In his 2006 memoir, John Rich, the director of "All in the Family" and many other '60s-'70s-era sitcoms, wrote that "it was always [show creator] Norman Lear's intention to keep George Jefferson completely offstage for the life of the series. George became almost a mythic character in the scripts [because] instead of showing up himself, he would send his brother, Henry, over to the Bunkers when it became necessary to interact" with them.

When Stewart got a full-time job on another show, Lear at long last decided to launch George into the world. He initially sought out Broadway veteran Avon Long, but when that didn't work ("he was a sweet old man," wrote Rich, who died in 2012, "not the feisty spirit to take on Archie"), Lear remembered Hemsley, then starring in a San Francisco production of "Purlie!," the musical based on the Ossie Davis play "Purlie Victorious." Hemsley, 35, was invited to audition. 

Rich wrote that the day of the audition Sanford took him aside. "Is that little runt going to be my husband?" Hemsley's bantamweight stature was to become a running joke on both "Family" and spinoff "The Jeffersons" (1975-85). 

In his "Emmy Legends" interview, Hemsley, who died in 2012, said he was given a script at the audition, then told to read a couple of lines. Afterward, "Carroll said, He's the guy — pompous and feisty.'"

During the taping, Hemsley recalled that "here I am [behind the door] and I had to make the entrance into this show that had been a smash for years. I had never been on TV, other than this entrance through this door, and thinking, 'should I [turn and] run?' … That's how I felt."

But In just under two minutes, Hemsley would create a TV character who synthesized Black aspiration — the famed "movin' on up" of the huge hit he and Sanford later launched — and who became a powerful rebuke to the Archies of the world. Dressed in a bespoke dark gray suit with a red carnation boutonniere, Hemsley also graced the historic scene with a touch of pathos, and humanity.

"I love you," George said to Stewart's Henry, as both brothers hugged. In that fleeting moment, TV comedy — long the genre of punch lines and laugh tracks — had finally found a touch of pathos and humanity, too.