Norman Lear, Pioneering TV Producer of ‘All in the
Family’ and ‘The Jeffersons,’ Dead at 101
Boundary-breaking iconoclast behind 'Sanford and Son,'
'Maude,' 'Good Times' and more addressed — and smashed —
social taboos
Norman Lear, the groundbreaking TV producer who smashed
boundaries with politicized sitcoms such as All in the
Family, helped diversify network television with shows
The Jeffersons and Good Times, and used the half-hour
comedy to address social issues and taboo, hot-button
topics, died Tuesday at his Los Angeles home. He was 101.
Lear’s rep, Lara Bergthold, confirmed his death to the
New York Times.
“Norman lived a life in awe of the world around him,” his
family wrote in a statement. “He marveled at his cup of
coffee every morning, the shape of the tree outside his
window and the sounds of beautiful music. But it was
people — those he just met and those he knew for decades
— who kept his mind and heart forever young.” Lear’s
family added that he was “surrounded by his family as we
told stories and sang songs until the very end.”
Before Lear and his pioneering series All in the Family,
network sitcoms had as much edge as a butter knife — and
Lear himself was more than happy to take credit for
changing that. “Before All in the Family, there were a
lot of families on television, but the biggest problem
they faced was Mom dented the fender or the boss is
coming to dinner and the roast is ruined,” Lear once
said. “America had no racial problems, no economic
problems. Women didn’t get breast cancer, men didn’t get
hypertension.”
All those issues and more were addressed in the shows
Lear developed, produced and sometimes wrote. All in the
Family, Maude, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, and Good
Times, among others, brought political and social
awareness to TV. As Robert Redford once said of Lear, “He
brought humanity, edge, humor and vulnerability into the
mainstream and we owe him a great debt for that.”
Born July 27, 1922, Lear endured an early childhood
trauma: When he was nine, his father Herman was convicted
of selling fake bonds and sentenced to three years in
prison. After briefly attending Boston’s Emerson College,
Lear dropped out and joined the Air Force during World
War II, flying 52 combat missions. He ventured into
public relations afterward, but comedy writing would
prove to be his forte. In the 1950s, he wrote for variety
series like The Colgate Comedy Hour and eventually
started a production company, Tandem Productions, with
director Bud Yorkin. Lear’s screenplay for Divorce
American Style, cowritten with Robert Kaufman, was
nominated for an Oscar in 1967.
But Lear was destined to change TV. In 1968, he adapted a
British sitcom, Till Death Do Us Part, for American TV.
The show was based around the bigoted head of a household
who reminded Lear of his own father. After knocking
around as a pilot for ABC for two years, the networked
dropped the show (once called Justice for All), but in
1970, CBS, eager to draw in younger viewers after
dropping more wholesome sitcoms like Green Acres, picked
it up.
The first episode of the renamed, re-cast All in the
Family — starring Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker, Jean
Stapleton as his long-suffering wife Edith, Sally
Struthers as their daughter Gloria, and Rob Reiner as her
boyfriend and later husband, Mike — started with a
disclaimer: “The program you are about to see is All in
the Family. It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our
frailties, prejudices and concerns. By making them a
source of laughter, we hope to show — in a mature fashion
— just how absurd they are.”
What followed — arguments about Black Power, bits of
raunchy humor and sex jokes — was unlike anything on TV
at the time, and it never let up: Brilliantly played by
O’Connor with equal parts bluster and vulnerability,
Archie, a proud, politically incorrect bigot, antagonized
his family (and hippie son-in-law) about race, the
Vietnam War and race relations. Initially controversial,
All in the Family became a phenomenon — watched by over
50 million viewers and winning 22 Emmys during its run
from 1971 to 1979. (The show was renamed Archie Bunker’s
Place and lasted another four seasons.)
Lear was sometimes asked if the series’ popularity had to
do with attracting viewers who were just like Archie.
“Maybe they continued to agree with Archie Bunker — you
can’t change people’s minds, but you can get them to
think,” he replied. Lear himself had another explanation
for the show’s success — that is dispelled one particular
TV myth. “The myth is: ‘The average man doesn’t want to
come home from a hard day’s work and be faced with
problems on television. He wants escapism,
entertainment, fluff,’” Lear told the Senate Subcommittee
on Constitutional Rights in 1972. “All in the Family has
tackled many everyday problems and the average American,
returned from his hard day’s work, has not only accepted
it but made it the most popular show on TV.”
Lear continued moving into that uncharted TV territory
with Maude, an All in the Family spin-off centered around
the older, left-wing title character played by Bea
Arthur. Lear would later say that, of all his characters,
Maude spoke to him the most. “She was the out-front
liberal but didn’t really take responsibility for knowing
what she was talking about all the time, which is what
most of us do,” he once said. “We deal from our feelings
more than from the information and the facts.”
Lear also created or developed arguably the first TV
series centered around Black families: Sanford and Son
(like All in the Family, adopted from a British series
with the same premise), The Jeffersons and Good Times. As
with All in the Family and Maude, the shows intercut
humor with messages. When Lear read an article about the
rise in hypertension in Black men, the story became the
basis for one episode. “By the time we went into reruns,
we knew that we had to have an advisory at the end of it,
advising where people could turn for help,” Lear said.
“Because we had had so many calls on the first show that
were unanticipated. There were lots of examples of that.”
“You have to go back to Norman Lear,” Good Times star
Jimmie Walker later said. “He just really pushed it.
Things like the “Black Jesus” show [in which Walker’s
character, the lazy but artistic J.J., paints Jesus as
Black], it’s still socially relevant. People are still
slugging that out today.”
Sometimes working on several shows at once, Lear was
involved in the sitcom One Day at a Time, the soap opera
parody Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and its fake-talk-show
spin-off, Fernwood 2Night. By the dawn of the Eighties
and the end of Lear’s heyday, TV had been transformed.
Just as TV would change again — losing some of its social
consciousness and, with series like Dallas and Dynasty,
focusing on the country’s new One Percent — Lear changed
gears. He launched a nonprofit organization, People for
the American Way, to address election reforms and protect
First Amendment rights. (In 2000, Lear and his wife Lyn
purchased one of the 25 surviving original prints of the
Declaration of Independence for $8.14 million and sent it
on a “road trip” so Americans could view it.)
In 1999, then-president Bill Clinton presented Lear with
a National Medal of Arts and said, “Norman Lear has held
up a mirror to American society and changed the way we
look at it.” Lear’s concerns about voting rights were
also reflected in the launch of another group, Declare
Yourself. In 2003, he said that by starting that group,
he hoped to dispel “cynicism, hopelessness, the thought
that one vote doesn’t matter, not liking the candidates
…. we’re encouraged in our culture to think too much in
the short term as opposed to what’s in it for my children
and grandchildren? That’s the way we have to encourage
people to think.”
Lear’s later forays into television weren’t as successful
as his first. In 1994, he produced 704 Hauser, an All in
the Family spin-off of sorts set in the same house where
the Bunkers lived (but now occupied by an Black family
led by John Amos). It was canceled after one season. But
Lear’s legacy was affirmed when he consulted on a few
episodes of South Park. In 2014, he published a well-
received autobiography, Even This I Get to Experience, in
which he wrote about his clashes with O’Connor during the
All in the Family years. At the time of his death, Lear
was living in Los Angeles with Lyn Davis Lear, his third
wife.
Although All in the Family may seem dated, Reiner has
said that the show’s — and Lear’s — intent lives on. “The
issues are also still real,” Reiner said in 2014. “We’re
still a very divided country — we’re a red and blue state
country. Many of those issues brought up on the show are
debated today, so it still has relevance from that
standpoint.”
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