Norman Lear didn’t just change television – he changed how we look at ourselves
Usually, if you’re a news organization that deals in entertainment, you have material prepared in advance to honor icons of your industry – an obituary, an appreciation, something. But I didn’t prepare anything about Norman Lear even as he passed his 100th birthday last year and then his 101st this past July because it seemed inconceivable he could ever die. He would just glide around beneath his signature porkpie hat forever, reassuring the masses that everything was right with the world because he was still in it.
But now that Lear is gone – he died Tuesday night in his sleep – it’s time to give the man who produced “All in the Family,” and “Sanford and Son,” and “The Jeffersons,” and “Maude,” and “Good Times,” and “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” and “One Day at a Time” his due. The thing is, it’s not really possible to adequately describe the man’s impact on the television medium because it went way beyond entertainment. With “All in the Family” in particular, Lear changed the way American society saw itself in the 1970s and beyond.
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How controversial was “All in the Family”? When it premiered on CBS in 1971, the nervous network aired it with the following 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.”
Mind you, CBS put it on as a daring act after ABC had passed on it twice, not imagining it would remain on the air very long. Indeed, the network was just coming out of its so-called “rural purge” when it canceled such standbys as “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Green Acres.” “It was just a fluke that Norman found a new regime at CBS that was looking to make its mark,” says Jim Colucci, author of the 2021 book, “All in the Family: The Show That Changed Television.” “It was very hard for him to get the show on the air in the first place.”
Why was it so hard? As Colucci says, “Norman would say that sitcoms before ‘All in the Family’ were, ‘Oh no, the boss is coming over for dinner and the wife ruined the roast – what will we do?’ It was all very sanitized and toothless. And Norman just had this vision that TV could be something that changed the world. Maybe he wasn’t the first person to have that vision, but he was the first to act on it in a way that made comedy the vehicle for change.”
In “All in the Family,” Lear brought to an unprepared audience a show that dealt frankly and unblinkingly with racism, feminism, sexual orientation, the Vietnam War, religion and politics. It introduced America to the blue-collar conservative, cigar-chomping, simpleminded, unapologetic, misogynist, reactionary bigot Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) and his goodhearted but befuddled and passive wife Edith (Jean Stapleton), along with Archie’s bleeding-heart liberal son-in-law Mike Stivic (Rob Reiner) and heart-on-her-sleeve daughter Gloria (Sally Struthers). The show – based on the British sitcom “Till Death Us Do Part” – exploded onto the air and was number one in the ratings by the end of ’71. And it stayed that way for four more years, winning four straight Best Comedy Series Emmys in the bargain.
SEEHappy 100th birthday, Norman Lear! Our appreciation of the legendary ‘All in the Family’ creator
The show ruled television and commanded national attention to a degree that’s almost impossible to imagine in today’s fractured TV landscape. Its defiant topicality and unwillingness to pull its punches made “All in the Family” the ultimate dinner-table conversation show throughout the country. It faced controversial subjects head on, including rape, abortion, what was then called women’s lib, class struggles and social upheaval. It was the first show to be videotaped in front of a live studio audience and never used a laugh track, so every guffaw you hear is genuine. The jolt of real life that it supplied was palpable. Norman Lear was the fearless maestro who orchestrated it all.
To author Colucci’s mind, Lear’s brilliance was in seeing that you could talk to America through that box residing in the living room.
“Norman not only made us laugh but made us laugh at ourselves and laugh at the problems of the world and some of the ways we react poorly to them,” Colucci believes, “and he really changed the world by doing that. What genius he displayed just to see that, never mind then to create a show as brilliant, well-written, well-acted and well-cast as ‘All in the Family’.”
While he never quite matched the lightning-in-a-bottle that he created with “All in the Family,” Lear was behind a string of game-changing comedies that pushed the content envelope but also never forgot that their first responsibility was to be funny – something that can get lost in the genre confusion that is the current streaming age.
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The great writer Paddy Chayevsky, who won three Academy Awards – including for his screenplays for “Marty” and Network” – once said that Lear “took television away from dopey wives and dumb fathers, from the pimps, hookers, hustlers, private eyes, junkies, cowboys and rustlers that constituted television chaos, and in their place he put the American people.”
That’s a pretty good description of Lear’s greatest achievement, all right. He made primetime a place where real people did and said real things – things we weren’t always comfortable with but that emerged from a place of authenticity. And despite his advancing years, age never stopped him. He kept creating through his 90’s and won his last two (of six) Emmy Awards in 2019 and 2020 for a pair of “Live in Front of a Studio Audience” specials. This made him the oldest Emmy winner ever at 98.
Author Colucci, who says he “cherished every minute I was in his presence” while the two worked together on his “All in the Family” book and while discussing the show and Lear’s career during appearances, said that a standard question people asked of Lear was whether his most acclaimed series could possibly be done today.
“You expected him to say audiences were too sensitive, too politically correct, too this, too that,” Colucci recalls, but instead he would ask, ‘Honestly, why not?’ He’d say, ‘I know the reasons why not, but I still don’t see why not.’ And I asked him this question when he was 99 years old. He was fearless to the end.”
That sort of fearlessness isn’t in great supply today. There’s plenty of daring, but often it’s about shock value. That wasn’t Lear. He would often say that he didn’t create and produce “All in the Family” to see what he could get away with. He was simply following his heart, his head and his soul. At the end of the day, that’s what made him the single most influential and impactful figure in the history of the medium.
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