Synopsis
A hard-drinking Anglo widower, Ed stubbornly refuses to fit in with the changing East L.A. neighborhood and has alienated most of the people who live around him. He uses ethnic slurs and berates Chico, a Latino, in an effort to get him to leave when Chico comes looking for a job. Yet Chico sees something in Ed, and sneaks back in at night to clean up the garage and move into an old van that Ed has parked inside. As Ed sees all the effort Chico has put in, he begins to warm to Chico. Over the course of the show, Ed grew to see Chico as family, although Ed will deny this on several occasions.
The chemistry between Jack Albertson's "Ed" and Freddie Prinze's "Chico" was a major factor in making the show a hit in its first two seasons. It started in the top ten and remained there for the first two seasons.
The show was created by James Komack who produced other successful TV shows such as The Courtship of Eddie's Father and Welcome Back, Kotter. Freddie Prinze was discovered by Komack after he appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in December 1973. Komack thought he would be perfect for the role of Chico Rodriguez.
As the show progressed, Chico's background was revealed as being Mexican on his father's side and Puerto Rican on his mother's side, and (in a nod to Prinze's faux-Hungarian ancestry) "...my grandmother speaks a little Hungarian!". (Though Prinze's paternal ancestry was actually German, in his stage-act he would claim his father was Hungarian, thereby allowing him to comically refer to himself as "Hungarican".) Chico was revealed to have spent part of his childhood in Hungary following the death of his mother, being raised by his Aunt Connie (a character who appeared in two other episodes). Chico attempts to explain his situation to Ed by portraying it as the dilemma of his distant cousin in Hungary, torn between the farmer for whom he now works and whom he has grown to love, and another farmer who has offered him a better job. During this scene and this episode, the love between these disparate characters was made clear for the first time, which Carlos notes when he releases Chico from his promise. By the second season, Ed begins to see that he is a part of a bigger world, although he still complains about it. By this time he has found himself a girlfriend by the name of Flora (played by Carole Cook).
Read more about this topic: Chico And The Man