Bluesky

The horrific news from Los Angeles Sunday night, that filmmaker and actor Rob Reiner, 78, and his wife, Michele Reiner, 70, were found murdered in their Brentwood home and that their own son, Nick, stood charged with their deaths capped a weekend of violent news. A shooter at Brown University killed two and wounded nine. The violence at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia left 15 dead and 40 injured. In an ambush in Syria, two American soldiers and a translator were killed by an ISIS terrorist.

All of it is awful, but in the case of the Reiner murders, America lost a voice that had been part of our pop culture and political conversation since the late 1960s. On our TV and movie screens, Reiner came to represent a friendly face of the American liberal left. Reiner rose to stardom in the 1970s on the blockbuster sitcom All in the Family. It happened alongside that of actors like Alan Alda on M*A*S*H, Bea Arthur on Maude, Esther Rolle on Good Times, and Bonnie Franklin on One Day at a Time—all during a run of topically minded primetime TV programming that amplified liberal politics at a moment unlike any other in our pop culture.

The son of writer-director-comedian Carl Reiner, he began his career writing on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a leftish music and sketch comedy program, and appearing on shows like Gomer Pyle, USMC as a flower child. In All in the Family, he played liberal college student Mike Stivic, in near-constant opposition to his father-in-law, blue-collar Queens conservative Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Conner), who usually addressed him as “Meathead.” Stivic lived in his in-laws’ house while he studied at Columbia University, and their wives, Gloria Stivic (Sally Struthers) and Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton), were often caught in the middle between their bickering and staunchly ideological husbands, and often unwittingly shut Archie down. That combustible, close-quarters family setting created some of the best confrontational political satire ever put on television. Stivic almost always had the moral and ideological upper hand when it came to his arguments with Archie, but Reiner always played him with just enough hectoring pomposity and smug overconfidence to help us understand why Archie found him so insufferable. Half a century later, Reiner could still be found arguing daily on social media with another loudmouth oaf from Queens, President Donald Trump.

Trump gloated over Reiner’s murder, the way he did about Stephen Colbert’s show getting canceled and Jimmy Kimmel’s getting suspended—as if Reiner’s murder were another media victory for him. Trump said the murders were “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump…” Trump’s glee—which inadvertently seemed to justify the rage of his own MAGA devotees spurred on to lethal political violence—only gave more credence to Reiner’s frequent claim that Trump is “mentally unfit to be president.” Asked to clarify—or perhaps temper—his callous and narcissistic outburst at an Oval Office press conference, Trump instead doubled down on it.

Despite his liberal politics, Reiner remains so beloved that even Republicans challenged Trump’s pathetic attack. “This is wrong,” New York Republican Representative Mike Lawler replied to Trump on X.com. “Regardless of one’s political views, no one should be subjected to violence, let alone at the hands of their own son. It’s a horrible tragedy that should engender sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period.” Prominent Trump critics on the right like Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have no MAGA cred to lose anymore, also chastised the president.

When Reiner turned his focus to directing, he released a stellar run of films, beginning in 1984 with This is Spinal Tap. His films covered a wide array of genres and subjects, but several stand as classics: Stand By Me (1986) The Princess Bride (1987), When Harry Met Sally… (1989), and A Few Good Men (1992). From there, he helmed a string of political dramas like Ghosts of Mississippi (1996) and LBJ (2016). In 2015, Reiner and his son Nick also made a semi-autobiographical movie, Being Charlie, about a father and son’s turbulent relationship and the son’s addiction issues.

Reiner had no signature visual style. He was not an “auteur” in the heavy-handed sense—a director advertising that what you are watching is being directed at all times. He belongs more in a category of filmmakers focused on the emotional themes shaping their films—conveyed in plot and characters—more than the style of the storytelling itself. His best work belongs alongside films directed by Robert Redford, Mike Nichols, and studio-era directors like George Stevens, William Wyler, and Fred Zinneman. Reiner had a perfect sense of the dramatic core of a scene and a perfect eye for casting. It’s why, even though he did not write most of the films he made, you will never forget lines like “These go to 11” or “I’ll have what she’s having” and “You can’t handle the truth!” or Wallace Shawn’s “Inconceivable!”

Perhaps most important for residents of California, Reiner never lost sight of his true sense of activism. He played the comical flower child and liberal know-it-all on sitcoms or the boorish Marxist Sheldon Flenner in Woody Allen’s 1994 film Bullets Over Broadway, but became incredibly effective, along with wife Michele, as a fundraiser and organizer in state politics. In 1998, he co-organized a campaign to pass California Proposition 10, the California Children and Families Initiative. It put a 50¢ tax on cigarettes and tobacco products to fund First 5 California, a series of health programs for children in the preschool age range. He spent eight years as its chair, and his success lead to a lot of talk about his running for public office.

Reiner chose not to do it, and arguably remained more effective in his role as an activist with an outsize pop-culture platform. He and Michele later cofounded the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which successfully challenged California’s Proposition 8—a voter initiative that banned same-sex marriage. She was the group’s treasurer. Vital to its success was recruiting conservatives like George W. Bush’s solicitor general to the Supreme Court, Theordore B. Olsen, and former RNC chair Ken Mehlman. As strident as Reiner could be on social media, he understood the importance of bipartisan activism. They got Proposition 8 overturned in 2013.

Reiner used his influence and fortune in the entertainment industry to sound strategic effect as a political organizer. He was born into privilege, and all charges of nepo-babyism certainly apply—both All in the Family and This Is Spinal Tap were backed by his father’s friend Norman Lear. Reiner took all that he had been given as both a personal and civic challenge—a platform with which he paid back all those breaks. Just as important, he knew what to do with the influence it bestowed. That is both his legacy as an artist and as a key figure in making the state of California a far better place to live for millions of its citizens. These achievements speak far more powerfully to us—and even, it seems, to a growing cohort of GOP legislators—than the petty, vindictive, self-serving politics of Donald Trump.