Archie and Edith's surprise reunion

The question was what his TV wife would call him. "I must tell you that Jean loves me," he says, and when they press him, he doesn't budge. "She does." So the hosts spring their little surprise and call her out to join him.

Out she comes, and the two old co-stars hug. Then there's a small seating problem. "They said sit near you," she tells him, so somebody has to move over to make room. "I'll do what I'm told," comes the answer.

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Neither of them can remember ever sitting together on a talk show like this. "This is the first," one of them says. "We are honored."

Nobody had warned Carroll. "They didn't tell me they were going to do that," he says. Jean kept the secret even though she'd seen him on Monday night, after the opening of his new film, "Return to Me." The crowd around him was so thick there was no time to talk, though he did introduce her to David Duchovny.

She has plenty to say now. "It's all about people," she says of the film, which has no special effects. He plays an Irishman who owns and runs a restaurant bar, a man so far from Archie that she'd hardly know him. "That is the mark of a very fine actor."

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Asked how that feels, Carroll keeps it short. "It makes me feel like a winner." A new generation is watching the old show on Nick, and the fan mail comes by the ton, lovely letters, some from young people seeing it for the first time and reacting just the way people did at the start.

It's a little startling to hear Jean in her own easy, everyday voice, with no trace of Edith in it. When the hosts ask for the old voices, she says no, and they beg. "In the first place, I only do it for pay," she says. Someone offers 20 bucks, and she says it would take a lot more than that. "Secondly, one does not go back."

She'll explain where the voice came from, though. She'd found a nasal sound for a kooky character she played in "Damn Yankees," on Broadway and in the movie. For the first pilot of All in the Family, she played a very different woman, closer to the one in the English version, who was every bit as abrasive as its Archie. The voice came later, in rehearsal. "I think I'll use that nasal voice because it's funny."

Carroll gets the last word, and he spends it on her. If she'd played it the English way, he says, he doesn't think the show would have worked in America. "She made a wonderful choice." Archie would have choked on a compliment like that.