To hear All in the Family creator and producer Norman Lear tell it, working with show star Carroll O’Connor was both a blessing and an affliction.

A blessing because when he first saw O’Connor read for the role of Archie Bunker, he knew he’d found the only actor for the part. And working with the actor was an affliction because, Lear claimed, O’Connor made the weekly process of going over the show’s scripts “impossible.”

One script in particular drove the actor to tears and nearly resulted in the show’s permanent axing.

The episode O’Connor found distasteful

As All in the Family creator and producer Norman Lear described in his 2014 memoir, Even This I Get to Experience, the actor was a joy to watch at his craft. He seemed to morph into the character of Archie Bunker seamlessly. Unfortunately, he poured an equal amount of passion into the show’s scripts, taking issue with nearly all of them, according to Lear.

But the script that resulted in O’Connor dissolving into tears and attorneys, and with CBS threatening to k**ill off the show entirely was “The Elevator Story.”

In the second season’s fourteenth episode, which eventually did air in 1972, Archie finds himself on an elevator with a “working-class couple, clearly Latin.” The wife of the couple is “extremely pregnant and nervous.”

The elevator also carries a “classy Black guy” and an “emotionally fragile woman.”