Norman Lear Dies: TV Pioneer Behind “All In The Family” & Other Groundbreaking Series Was 101
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Norman Lear, who was responsible for revolutionizing television in the 1970s with such groundbreaking hit series as All in the Family, Good Times, and One Day at a Time, has died. He was 101.
Lear died Tuesday of natural causes at his home in Los Angeles, a spokesperson said.
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“Norman lived a life of creativity, tenacity and empathy,” his family said in a statement. “He deeply loved our country and spent a lifetime helping to preserve its founding ideals of justice and equality for all. Knowing and loving him has been the greatest of gifts.”
Lear’s other iconic series include Sanford & Son, Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, Fernwood 2 Night/America 2 Night, and the All in the Family spinoffs The Jeffersons, Maude and Archie Bunker’s Place. Good Times was spun off from Maude.
In a 1998 interview for the Television Academy Foundation, Lear said, “Flying across country [one] night, I remember looking down and thinking, ‘Hey, it’s just possible, wherever I see a light, I’ve helped to make somebody laugh.'”
He remained active in the entertainment industry as he neared the centenary mark, winning Emmy Awards in 2019 and 2020 for installments of Live in Front of a Studio Audience, in which episodes of All in the Family, The Jeffersons and Good Times were re-enacted with new performers. Live in Front of a Studio Audience also revisited Diff’Rent Strokes and The Facts of Life.
Lear’s success in television helped make him a prominent and influential political voice behind the scenes, leading to his founding in the early 1980s of People for the American Way, a group to counter the influence of the religious right. Like his creative efforts, he remained active in politics throughout his life, including in 2017 when, upon learning that he would receive a Kennedy Center honor, he said that he would not attend a White House reception beforehand to protest Donald Trump’s moves to defund the arts. That led to other recipients also canceling their plans to attend the Trump ceremony. Trump himself skipped the ceremony.
At this year’s ceremony on Sunday, honoree Billy Crystal made a point to reporters that it was Lear who gave him his first major role — a guest spot on All in the Family.
Lear already had an established career as a writer and director in TV and movies by the late 1960s, when he and Bud Yorkin, his partner in production company Tandem Productions, tried to sell a sitcom about a blue-collar American family. Two pilots were rejected by ABC. But CBS picked up the show, based in part on the British sitcom Til Death Do Us Part. When All in the Family debuted on January 12, 1971, the ratings were not stellar, but it was lauded creatively, even as the network worried about its content.
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Although then-CBS President Robert D. Wood had been interested in a series that aligned with the times, the network’s standards and practices department was wary. In a 2014 interview, Lear recalled that 20 minutes before the show was to debut, he threatened to walk out in protest over CBS censors’ threats to remove one line from the show. “It was a little battle, but I knew that I just simply had to win that or I would lose from then on,” he said. The show aired intact and, as he was fond of saying, “not one state seceded from the union.”
The audience for All in the Family picked up in subsequent months, and by the next season it was the No. 1 show in primetime — and would remain so for five consecutive seasons through 1975-76.
With its unvarnished portrayal of a bigot in Archie Bunker (O’Connor), often warring against his “meathead” liberal son-in-law, Mike Stivic (Rob Reiner), the show actually resonated with audiences of all political stripes. But it also ushered in a new era of the primetime TV landscape, with more topical — and controversial — fare replacing rural and fantasy sitcoms. Shows like Gomer Pyle USMC and The Andy Griffith Show were huge hits in the ’60s, but they ignored the Vietnam War and civil rights movement happening in real life. In contrast, few episodes of All in the Family went by without some mention of Archie Bunker’s love of the then-current president, Richard Nixon, or railing against liberal causes like the peace movement and women’s liberation.
Jean Stapleton played Archie’s “dingbat” wife Edith, as Archie often called her, and Sally Struthers was their “little girl,” Gloria.
Lear wanted All in the Family to end in 1979, as Stapleton announced that she was leaving the show. But CBS executives convinced O’Connor to continue with the character in the newly named sitcom Archie Bunker’s Place. Although the show came from Lear’s production company, he had limited involvement in the successor series. In his 2014 book, Even This I Get to Experience, he wrote that he agreed to sign off on the new show as long as the network made a substantial donation in Edith Bunker’s name to the National Organization for Women in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, and that Stapleton appear in the first few episodes before she eventually was killed off in the second season.
Yet another All in the Family character also went solo in her own series. Struthers toplined Gloria, which also came from Lear’s production company, but it lasted just one season in 1982-83.
By 1972, networks were craving the type of fare that was relevant to the times. Lear and his production company unleashed a string of hits, including Sanford and Son, an NBC sitcom about a Black junk dealer (Redd Foxx) and his son (Demond Wilson). It was in the top ten of the ratings for its first five seasons. The show helped pave the way for a number of shows that centered on Black characters, whose stories were all but absent from primetime.
Maude, a CBS spinoff of All in the Family, also arrived in 1972 and turned the Bunker concept on its head. It featured Bea Arthur as liberal Maude Finlay, whose principled stands on causes often found her at odds with her neighborhood or in hypocritical situations. Other shows a Maude spinoff, Good Times, debuting in 1974, centering on Finlay’s housekeeper and her family, living in the housing projects, and The Jeffersons, an All in the Family spinoff debuting in 1975, about a well-to-do Black couple living in a “deluxe apartment in the sky.”
By 1974-75, Good Times and The Jeffersons joined All in the Family in the year-end primetime Top 10.
The string of hits continued with One Day at a Time, debuting in 1975 and starring Bonnie Franklin as a divorced mom of two headstrong teenage girls (Mackenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli). During the decade Lear continued to produce hits even in late night hours, with the Louise Lasser-led Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a weeknight series that satirized soap operas, followed by spinoffs Fernwood 2 Night and America 2-Night, parodies of talk shows that featured Martin Mull and Fred Willard.
At a time when viewers had just three networks for their entertainment diet, Lear’s series were hugely influential, and the fact that some of the content got on broadcast television is all the more amazing in that some of the topics still might generate protest today.
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Perhaps the most controversial of all episodes Lear produced was a Maude two-parter in 1972 when she learns that she is pregnant at age 47. Maude struggles with whether to have an abortion, which she eventually does.
As controversial as the subject matter was, Lear recalled years later that the episode generated only a few letters of complaint and “there was no organized effort to make a crime of it.”
Abortion “was nothing they didn’t hear about or talk about. Or you didn’t learn in any neighborhood in America,” he said in a 2015 interview.
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It was only in subsequent years, as groups on the right began to more fully organize to target Hollywood, that Lear and his shows became more of a flashpoint. Although Nixon disliked All in the Family, the wife of his successor, Betty Ford, did. She was a big fan of Maude, and Lear recalled sending her tapes of episodes. When it came time to sell the show into syndication, she even helped him convince stations to buy it.
Lear also was a friend of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, even though they were on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Later in life, the former first lady invited him and his former business partner, Jerry Perenchio, a major GOP donor, to the Reagan Library for a Republican debate.
In the 1980s, Tandem acquired Avco Embassy Pictures for $25 million, merging with it with their TV businesses. It distributed movies including Blade Runner, Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap and A Chorus Line, but they sold the company to Coca-Cola for $485 million in 1985.
By then, Lear’s political activism was having a significant impact. A 1982 television special, I Love Liberty, featured a political cross section of figures including Jane Fonda and Barry Goldwater, and was hosted by Gerald R. Ford and Lady Bird Johnson. Showing diversity as part of the American fabric, it was designed to a counter to the rise of the televangelist, led by Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority.
The pushback from the right was fierce. Lear later recalled getting a letter from Pat Robertson in which he wrote that the TV producer’s “arms were too short to box with God. Lay off him.”
“And Jerry Falwell sent out a newsletter calling me the ‘No. 1 enemy of the American family in our generation,’ and I had serious death threats as a result,” Lear told Variety in 2011. People for the American Way proved to be influential in stopping the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork in 1987. He also co-founded that highlighted social issues and causes, including the Environmental Media Association, the Business Enterprise Trust and the Norman Lear Center at USC.
In his book, Lear recalled how, despite the lucrative sale of Embassy, his and Perenchio’s business had run into financial troubles by the late ’80s. As he wrote, the health of his new company Act III Communications was hovering “between grave and desperate.” But he held on, declining to sell it at a fire-sale price, and by the next decade the company was able to sell some of its holdings, eight Fox affiliates, for $500 million.
Although Lear’s efforts at ambitious new series including Sunday Dinner, The Powers That Be and 704 Hauser Street did not achieve the success of his earlier works, his 1970s sitcoms continued to resonate with audiences in reruns and later on streaming. A Netflix revival of One Day at a Times ran for four years from 201-21, and with Jimmy Kimmel he executive produced and co-hosted three installments of the Live in Front of a Studio Audience specials.
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By then, Lear’s shows were celebrated as not only relevant to the present day but also a bit prescient. On his 100th birthday, he published an essay in The New York Times in which he addressed comparisons between Archie Bunker — his most famous character — and Trump.
“For all his faults, Archie loved his country and he loved his family, even when they called him out on his ignorance and bigotries,” he wrote. “If Archie had been around 50 years later, he probably would have watched Fox News. He probably would have been a Trump voter. But I think that the sight of the American flag being used to attack Capitol Police would have sickened him. I hope that the resolve shown by Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and their commitment to exposing the truth, would have won his respect.”
Lear actually based the Bunker character in part on his father, a salesman and second-generation Russian Jew. “I grew up in a family very much like those of my characters, a family that lived at the top of its lungs and the end of its nerves,” Lear said, according to a tribute from the Television Academy when he was inducted among the first honorees in the Hall of Fame in 1984.
Born on July 27, 1922 in New Haven, CT, Lear attended Emerson College in Boston before enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Force in 1942, and he flew flew on 52 combat missions over Europe in a B-17 bomber.
After the war, he initially worked as a publicist in New York but moved to Los Angeles, where he pursued a career in comedy writing. With Ed Simmons, he wrote for The Colgate Comedy Hour and The Martha Raye Show. He and Yorkin eventually teamed to write for The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show, and Lear later wrote and directed The George Gobel Show. By the end of the 1950s, Lear had teamed with Yorkin in Tandem Productions, with an eye toward making a mark in movies.
That included Come Blow Your Horn, a comedy starring Frank Sinatra that Yorkin directed and Lear wrote, and Divorce American Style, starring Dick Van Dyke and Debbie Reynolds. Lear and Robert Kaufman were nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (they lost to William Rose’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner). Lear also directed and co-wrote another feature, Cold Turkey, which also starred Van Dyke.
Lear is survived by his wife, Lyn Davis Lear; his children Ellen, Kate, Maggie, Ben, Madeline and Brianna; and grandchildren Daniel, Griffin, Noah and Zoe.
A private service for immediate family will be held. In lieu of flowers or gifts, his family asked that contributions be made to People for the American Way.
Svante Myrick, the president of People for the American Way, said in a statement on Wednesday: “Norman loved this country, and he loved defending its ideals. We will honor Norman by carrying on the work to which he dedicated so much of his life.”
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