From 1910 to 1970, an estimated six million African-Americans moved from the rural South to urban cities in the northern region of the United States to escape the severe Jim Crow laws and seek better employment. Termed as the Great Migration, this mass exodus to the North significantly increased the black population in urban industrial cities like New York, Chicago and Detroit. Black bodies were now occupying geographic spaces that, for a long time, were mostly white. Advertisements in publications like the Chicago Defender and word-of-mouth testimonies extolled the North as a land of opportunity and equality, and, even though conditions did not live up to the idyllic narratives sold to them, millions of black families remained and took permanent residence in these cities. In 1947 the first suburb was created in Levittown, Long Island as a way to encourage families to buy homes and buy into the idea of the American Dream. Suburbs like Levittown soon became a place where white families could flee to in order to escape the masses of black people who, many felt, had infiltrated their urban space. Despite the many cold receptions, African-Americans still migrated north and settled there in hopes that they could make better lives for themselves. However, despite their large numbers and obvious presence, African-Americans in the North remained relatively invisible in the American imaginary. In a media-immersed society like ours, media representation equals visibility. If there is no one with whom one can identify with- either physically; or in regards to one’s beliefs, sexuality, etc.- in any of the many media images in circulation, then there is a way in which one can be regarded as insignificant or invisible. Similarly if there are limited media representations of a kind of a people, then those representations become a truth in the American imaginary for how said people are like or behave since there are no other representative examples to draw from. From the dawn of the first situational comedy in the 1940’s there have been an increased number of sensationalized representations of big city life. Shows like The Goldbergs, I Love Lucy, and The Honeymooners all took place in New York City. Despite the significant number of African-Americans living in American urban cities like New York, these shows, and shows like them, remained focused on white families, groups of friends, and communities. This, perhaps unintentionally, extended the white and idyllic quality of the suburbs to northern urban cities in the American imaginary. Sitcoms like these actively ignored and omitted the significant realities that were happening in the real-life cities in which their plots are based in, i.e. the abundance of African-American who were working and raising families and living lives alongside and next door to white families. If black characters were depicted at all, they were in roles of servitude to white families. Avoiding a realistic black presence and consequently hot-topic issues on popular sitcoms worked to maintain a similar utopic essence to the American big city, at least, artificially through televisual depiction. It wasn’t until TV producer, Norman Lear stepped into the sitcom game that African American’s began to gain visibility outside of roles of servitude. Lear’s shows are, what television scholars call relevance programming, in that the shows deal with touchy and relevant issues such as sex, politics and race. All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Good Times, Sanford and Son, all featured black cast members in urban cities, shedding light on the untold narratives of black life in the big city. In featuring of the Jefferson family on All in the Family, black people finally ‘arrive’ in the Northern American imaginary. The depiction of the Jefferson family in All in the Family, an affluent black family at that, helped to vary and improve representations of African-Americans from southern seclusion and servitude to urban visibility, modern world vocation and even prominence, disrupting the white, utopic quality of the American situational comedy. The Jeffersons is a spin-off of the successful prime-time comedy All in the Family (first aired in 1971), which is an American adaptation of the British sitcom, ‘Til Death Do Us Part. I would like to suggest, first, that All in the Family serves as allegory for a nostalgia yearning for the days before people of color, specifically black people, started moving into white neighborhoods and exacerbating racial tensions. The nostalgic feel of the series is partly due to the working-class setting. According to David Marc and Robert J. Thompson, “The working class setting of All in the Family was unusual in the 1970s; in fact, it was something g of a throwback to the 1950s, when sitcoms such as The Honeymooners and The Life of Riley were still in productionâ