In the ‘70s, while movies were entering a golden age, on television, Norman Lear was a one-man golden age. The introduction of the ratings system released the film industry from censorship and unleashed extraordinary talents from the too-clever-by-half shackles that had reined them in. Scorsese, Coppola, Ashby, Allen, Friedkin, and Altman (among others) turned an entire industry on its head.
Consequently, while the film industry was suddenly shot out of a creativity cannon, television remained mired in mediocrity. A long way from the days of cable and streaming, television in the ‘70s is mostly notable as quaint nostalgia, where a formulaic rot set in. The Love Boat, Charlie’s Angels (hell, everything Aaron Spelling produced), CHiPs, Dallas, Dynasty, and on and on and on. It was all so shallow…with one exception:
Norman Lear.
At a time when television was largely playing it safe (there were exceptions, but you don’t need your second hand to count them), Lear was playing for keeps. And he did it while making you laugh.
Starting in 1971 with the staggering half-hour comedy (I refuse to call his shows sitcoms) All in the Family, Lear laid down a small screen marker that may never be duplicated. His shows were full of flawed people making bad decisions, saying shocking things, dealing with heretofore taboo subjects, and getting away with it because the so-called jokes were not only hysterical, but real.
Archie Bunker (played so brilliantly by Carroll O’Connor) in All in the Family is one of the seminal characters in the history of the medium. Hell, in the history of performance. Somehow, Lear and O’Connor combined to take a casually racist, sexist, and homophobic man and built a show around him that somehow defied its center. Through Archie’s incredibly misguided view of the world, Lear and O’Connor showed us that this man, Archie Bunker, was both representative of a sizable portion of pretty damn unattractive American men (a fact that remains as true now as it was then), and yet somehow worth hearing and seeing every week for nearly the entirety of the decade.
Archie wasn’t purely hateful, he was just painfully wrong, but occasionally, when the moon was in Jupiter, he was capable of goodness—even if he could not access that attribute with consistency.
In building All in the Family around Archie Bunker, Lear made us look at the desperate white American male and understand his fear of change, of his day passing him by. Yet, he loved his daughter who married a hippie (a pre-directorial Rob Reiner), and adored his much more understanding wife who he, well, didn’t really understand.
The show was created and made by very liberal artists, but did not offend conservatives, or talk down to its audience. The show is a god damn minor miracle. Maybe not even all that minor. And it wasn’t even my favorite of Lear’s shows (although it is certainly his most celebrated).
My favorite Norman Lear show would debut one year later with Sanford and Son, starring the great Redd Foxx as a man running a junkyard with his son Lamont (the deeply undervalued Demond Wilson). Sanford and Son may not have gone as deep into the national psyche as All in the Family did, but it was funnier than anything else on television by a country mile. It was also one of the first shows to exhibit Black life on television in something akin to a realistic manner. Fred Sanford was both the mirror and the other side of the coin to Archie Bunker. Set in his ways, not of great income, and seldom behaving in an attractive manner, but still holding your attention every single week, and making you laugh relentlessly.
A couple of years ago I was going through one of those “I can’t decide what I want to watch” phases and on a lark, I cued up Sanford and Son. For a show made over 50 years ago, it held up like gangbusters. A Norman Lear trademark I suppose you could say.
The same year Sanford and Son debuted, so did Maude, a spin-off of All in the Family starring Bea Arthur as the very liberal cousin of Archie’s wife. I imagine if you were alive at the time of the age of reason, the two-part episode where a middle-aged Maude decides to have an abortion after getting unintentionally pregnant must have felt like a seismic shift beneath your feet. Yes, television still had a very crisp and tightly glued envelope, but I’ll be damned if Lear didn’t find the soft spot in every corner.
Leaning further into showcasing the lives of Black people, Lear debuted the ever so ironically titled Good Times in 1974 about a poor family living in the inner city, but still finding laughter and warmth despite their circumstances. Perhaps known in some corners for introducing a young Janet Jackson to the greater public, the episode where the head of the family (the great John Amos) dies in a car accident, leaving his wife (played by the terrific Esther Rolle) to carry on after suffering the twin shocks of losing her husband, and the financial death that comes with the loss of the family’s main bread-winner, deserves more than a little applause as well.
Good Times may have been a half-hour comedy, but that comedy was built around financial pain, unsafe living conditions, and an undercurrent of instability. But again, it was damn funny, so Lear (again) got away with a lot that no one else could have.
One year later in 1975, Lear would take up the cause of single mothers with One Day at a Time, starring Bonnie Franklin as a divorced woman trying to raise two teenage girls on her own. The idea of focusing on a divorcee with two kids may not sound revolutionary now, but believe you me, it most certainly was at the time.
As if completely unstoppable, Lear spun off another character from All in the Family the same year that One Day at a Time made its debut, and created another smash hit—The Jeffersons. Long before The Cosby Show centered its story around a successful Black couple, The Jeffersons did it first. George Jefferson (the cantankerous and uproarious Sherman Hemsley) moved his family from Queens to Manhattan after his chain of dry-cleaning stores became highly successful. George was new money, not old money. And while he might have had the struttiest of struts ever, it was his wife Louise (or “Weezy” as George would call her) who took whatever George gave her and returned it in kind. George may have “worn the pants” in the family, but Weezy (the marvelous Isabel Sanford) ruled the roost, despite what George may have decided to believe. Actually, I think “Weezy” allowed George to believe it. The Jeffersons is still the second longest running show starring Black characters in the history of television, and it surely has the greatest theme song (“We’re moving’ on up!”) that the medium has ever produced.
Lear found success in the ’80s too, but the quality of his output dipped. Silver Spoons and The Facts of Life were long-running hits, but neither (especially Spoons) dug nearly so deep as his ‘70s classics. 227, starring Marla Gibbs (who played the Jeffersons’ sass-mouthed maid) was better, but still comparatively superficial.
As TV dried up for Lear during the “Me Decade,” Lear found occasional (but notable) success on film as the executive producer of The Princess Bride, Fried Green Tomatoes, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, and Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It. Lear also served in the same capacity for the reboot of One Day At a Time on Netflix—the rare return to the well that was worthy of that return, even if the streamer gave it only three seasons (a fourth season aired on Pop TV).
If you were trying to pick out a common thread through Lear’s finest productions it would have to be his relentless focus on the issues of the middle and lower classes. Even The Jeffersons was about a Black man who became highly successful by working his ass off cleaning other people’s (mostly white people’s) clothes. A fact that I’m sure was no accident. Lear shined a light on those of us who were, for lack of a more graceful word, normal. He reveled in showcasing the flaws of people (all kinds of people) trying to get by and trying to hang on.
John Lennon once wrote and sang, “A working class hero is something to be.”
Norman Lear was something to be.
Norman Lear died on December 5, 2023. He was 101 glorious years old.