” to the well-worn furniture occupied by Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker on “All in the Family” to, yes, the actual bar used on screen in “Cheers.”
Absolutely. As this collection started to grow, it became clear that what I needed to archive were the important TV shows of our time, whether it’s “Star Trek” or “All in the Family,” “ The Sopranos” or “Breaking Bad,” these great, important shows, didn’t matter if I liked them or if they appealed to me personally. That’s how we built this archive. But now that the TV museum mission is over, at least with my team, I could not rationalize these pieces just continuing to sit in an archive.
After we decided the great majority of these pieces, some of them fantastic, we decided that what the balance would be. Some of the decisions were based on the immense footprint some of these pieces require in storage. That was the impetus for deciding it was time to part with the “All in the Family” set or Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” set. We always treated this like a very serious mission.