The killings of Rob and Michele Reiner shatter family's gentle legacy

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NEW YORK (AP) — Until Sunday's shocking double killings, few families seemed more apart from the dark side of life than the Reiners.

For decades, Rob Reiner and his father, Carl, had embodied a gentle, hopeful spirit in American culture, whether Dick Van Dyke's lovable antics on the show named for him and created by Carl, or the openly sentimental ending to Rob's “When Harry Met Sally…”, now held up as the kind of romantic comedy they don't seem to make anymore. Carl Reiner would call his son his favorite director, while Rob would recall being so awed by his father that he wanted to change his first name to Carl.

It was a dynasty seemingly spared of jealousy, cynicism and rage, or ambulances and police tape and 911 calls. Carl Reiner was married to his wife, Estelle, for more than 60 years; Rob to his wife, Michele, since 1989. Few would have imagined that “booked for murder” would appear in a sentence about any of them. But on Monday, Los Angeles police announced that 32-year-old Nick Reiner was in custody on suspicion of killing his parents, Rob and Michele.

“They were among my closest friends,” Maria Shriver wrote on Threads. “We laughed together, cried together, played together, dreamed together. We had dinner this past week, and they were in the best place in the their lives.”

Actor-producer Rita Wilson wrote in an Instagram post that it is “impossible to reconcile the tragedy of their deaths with the beauty they offered the world.”

The Reiners never pretended to like everybody. Carl Reiner, who died in 2020, had appeared in an anti- Donald Trump ad two years earlier, urging like-minded citizens to vote during the midterm elections. Rob Reiner was a liberal who denounced Trump for years as a threat to democracy, and was labeled by the president Monday a victim of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

But the Reiners' politics, even at their angriest, were rooted in persuasion and civic engagement, the belief that the right words could bring about justice and redemption. In “A Few Good Men,” Rob's adaptation of the Aaron Sorkin play, an inexperienced Navy defense lawyer outwits a bullying commander into confessing his complicity with the death of a young private. “The American President,” a 1995 Reiner-Sorkin collaboration released during President Bill Clinton's first term, was a kind liberal fairy tale about a wavering chief executive who rediscovers his principles — and finds love with an environmental lobbyist.

“Beneath all of the stories he (Rob Reiner) produced was a deep belief in the goodness of people — and a lifelong commitment to putting that belief into action,” former President Barack Obama wrote on X.

As the liberal Mike Stivic in “All in the Family,” Reiner argued constantly with his bigoted father-in-law, Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O'Connor), but never gave up on reconciling with him. After one especially heated exchange, Stivic's mother-in-law, Edith (Jean Stapleton), explains to him that Archie's anger comes out of resentment that Mike is young and his life is before him.

When he sees Archie again, Mike hugs him: “I understand,” he says.

Even the acknowledged struggles of Nick Reiner appeared to have been resolved. In his teens, he was in out of treatment facilities and was homeless on occasion. But by 2015, the two had worked together on the semi-autobiographical film, “Being Charlie,” about a young addict and his tensions with his famous father. Both would say the project brought them closer. Nick Reiner told People magazine at the time that movies proved a mutual passion. Rob Reiner told The Associated Press that he had confronted his mistakes as a parent.

“We didn’t go into it thinking this is going to be therapeutic or bring us closer, but it did come out that way,” Rob Reiner told the AP. “It forced us to understand ourselves better than we had. I told Nick while we were making it, I said, ‘you know it doesn’t matter, whatever happens to this thing, we won already. This has already been good.’”