R.I.P. Norman Lear, legendary producer and sitcom pioneer
Norman Lear, who created iconic series like All In The Family and The Jeffersons, died at age 101
Legendary TV writer and producer Norman Lear, who elevated the sitcom format by using comedy as a vehicle to tackle social issues, has died at the age of 101. In a career that spanned half a century, Lear created a string of hit shows, beginning with his best-known, most influential series, All In The Family, which itself spun two other hits, The Jeffersons, and Maude. Lear also produced the classic sitcoms Sanford And Son, Good Times, One Day At A Time, soap opera parody Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and talk show spoof Fernwood 2 Night.
Lear was born into a Jewish family in New Haven, Connecticut in 1922. When he was 9, his father, Herman, went to jail for three years for selling fake bonds. Lear saw his father as “a rascal,” and turned to his grandfather as a role model. His grandfather, Shya, was passionate about political issues, a trait he passed on to his grandson.
At age 20, Lear dropped out of Emerson College to join the Air Force after the U.S. entered WWII. He flew 52 combat missions in the Mediterranean as a gunner and radio operator on a B-17 Flying Fortress, for which he was decorated with the Air Medal. After the war, Lear went into public relations, moving to California to further his career. There he met Ed Simmons, the husband of Lear’s cousin Elaine, and an aspiring comedy writer. The two of them teamed up as door-to-door salesmen by day, and comedy writers by night, writing TV sketches for Martin and Lewis, and Rowan and Martin. Lear turned those opportunities into steady work writing for variety shows hosted by Martha Raye, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and George Gobel. In 1959, Lear created his first television show, The Deputy, a western starring Henry Fonda.
Flush with success on the small screen, Lear teamed with director Bud Yorkin (who he had worked with on several variety shows) to become a film producer, producing Never Too Late with Maureen O’Sullivan, The Night They Raided Minsky’s with Jason Robards, and two films with Dick Van Dyke—Cold Turkey, and Divorce, American Style, the latter of which Lear co-wrote, for which he received an Oscar nomination.
But Lear had his greatest success when he returned to television. He had developed a blue-collar sitcom, based loosely on the British show Til Death Do Us Part, about an argumentative conservative butting heads with his liberal son-in-law. ABC rejected the show twice, and Lear had to tape three different pilots before finally being picked up by CBS. All In The Family was a low-rated critical darling in its first season (winning the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series), but by the following year, it was the top-rated show on television, a position it would hold for five years.
In bigoted, outspoken, yet softhearted Archie Bunker, Lear (and Carroll O’Connor, who portrayed Archie for 13 years across two series) had created one of television’s most iconic characters. And in pitting Bunker against idealistic son-in-law Michael Stivic (Rob Reiner), and allowing his wife Edith (Jean Stapleton) and daughter Gloria (Sally Struthers) grow from passive characters to more assertive ones, both liberals and conservatives had someone to identify with on the show, and Americans from all walks of life saw their own families’ political discussions echoed in the Bunker household.
The show was such a cultural institution that the easy chairs from the Bunkers’ living room were sitting in the Smithsonian while the show was still on the air (Lear had replicas built to continue taping). When Family ended its run after 9 years, neither Lear nor America was ready to let go, so the show was retooled as Archie Bunker’s Place, centered around a bar Archie had bought in the original show’s eighth season, and ran for four more years.
Lear didn’t rest on his laurels. In the five years after Family premiered, Lear launched five more long-running hit sitcoms, all essentially built on the same template—family shows that mixed politics and humor, with an outspoken, curmudgeonly lead, staged like a play in front of a live studio audience, a practice that All In The Family pioneered. But while Lear stuck to a basic template for his series, he pushed television’s boundaries when it came to representation.
Before Lear got back into TV, there had only been a handful of shows with predominantly black casts in the history of the medium. But a year after Family, Lear cast comedian Redd Foxx, as a cantankerous junk dealer who sparred with his more levelheaded son. Sanford And Son was an immediate hit, finishing at #2 in the ratings (behind All In The Family) in two of its six seasons. Two years later came Good Times, about the struggles of a working-class black family (although the show became Lear’s broadest offering, as breakout star Jimmie Walker pushed slapsticks and catchphrases to the fore).
Then in 1974, All In The Family spun off The Jeffersons, in which Archie Bunker’s more successful black neighbors (Sherman Hemsley and Isabel Sanford) move to a Manhattan high-rise. The series was built solidly on the Lear template, mixing wisecracks, farce, and frank discussions of race and other social issues, centered around an irascible, opinionated man of the house. But The Jeffersons was also groundbreaking simply for putting an affluent African-American family on television, something that had never been done. Like Sanford and Good Times before it, The Jeffersons was a top ten show, and the most enduring of Lear’s sitcoms, running for eleven seasons. After Norman Lear, it was impossible for the networks to pretend white audiences wouldn’t tune into see a show with a black cast (although they would certainly try).
While Lear originally conceived of the women in the Bunker household as pushovers, so as not to leave Archie outnumbered in Family’s back-and-forth, he’d quickly embrace feminism, both by giving Edith and Gloria more backbone, and with two more hit sitcoms. Maude was All in The Family’s first spinoff, built around Bea Arthur’s outoutspoken liberal feminist. The show was, if anything, more serious and political than All In The Family, dealing with drug abuse, domestic violence, and even abortion. Despite frequently courting controversy, Maude was another hit for Lear, spending its first four seasons (out of six) in the top ten. And the last of his string of hit sitcoms in the ‘70s was One Day At A Time, which starred Bonnie Franklin as a divorcee raising two teenage daughters, who was frequently torn between raising them to be independent women and wanting to keep them under her watchful eye. The same year, Lear also produced soap opera spoof Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a short-lived but influential show whose absurd, complicated plots would presage Soap and Arrested Development.
Lear had launched seven TV comedies in six years, and Hartman was the only one that wasn’t a smash hit. In the 1974-75 season, half the shows in the top ten were Norman Lear productions. In 1978 Lear took a break from TV to develop a film that never got produced, and his remarkable run of hits was over. But those shows’ impact was lasting. The “Norman Lear sitcom” was a genre unto itself—one generations of TV producers would try (and usually fail) to imitate.
Even Lear himself couldn’t recapture that magic, as two attempts to return to the sitcom world in the 1990s—Sunday Dinner, about a widower who marries a woman the same age as his kids; and 704 Hauser, about a liberal black couple with a conservative son who move into the former Bunker residence. Neither show lasted past six episodes.
Lear continued to produce films for the rest of his life. He bankrolled All In The Family actor Rob Reiner’s directorial debut, This Is Spinal Tap, and produced his later effort, The Princess Bride. Lear also produced Fried Green Tomatoes, and documentaries about All-American subjects like Pete Seeger, and the Declaration of Independence (of which Lear owned an original copy). Later in life, he executive produced the diverse reboot of One Day At A Time and was working on new versions of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and an animated Good Times before his death.
Lear was as politically active outside of his career as he was in it, founding liberal advocacy group People For The American Way, and his activism got him named “No. 1 enemy of the American family” by Jerry Falwell, and a spot on Nixon’s enemies list. (The ex-president can be heard discussing All In The Family on the Watergate tapes.)
Even when Lear, by his own admission, “blew a fortune in a series of bad investments in failing businesses,” he maintained an optimism and enthusiasm for life. After realizing his money woes meant he may have to sell his house, he told his son-in-law, “Terrible, of course, but I must be crazy, because despite all that’s happened, I keep hearing this inner voice saying, ‘Even this I get to experience.’”
With additional reporting from Mary Kate Carr.