- Oct 17, 2011
- 33,309
- 36,627
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Atheist
- Marital Status
- Legal Union (Other)
Norman Lear, who revolutionized prime-time TV with ‘All in the Family,’ dies
Norman Lear, the multiple Emmy-Award-winning writer-producer and liberal political activist who revolutionized prime-time television in the 1970s with groundbreaking, socially relevant situation comedies such as “All in the Family,” “Maude” and “The Jeffersons,” has died. He was 101.In the mid-1970s, it was estimated that some 120 million Americans — more than half the nation’s population at the time— watched the various sitcoms produced by Lear and Bud Yorkin, his longtime partner in Tandem Productions. Indeed, Lear and Yorkin had five of the top 10 programs in the Nielsen ratings for the 1974-75 TV season.
The taping of the 1968 pilot [of All in the Family] generated big laughs from the live studio audience, but ABC passed on it ... deciding that the show’s potentially offensive language and content would be inappropriate in a country already in turmoil over the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, racism, Watergate and the emerging feminist movement.
CBS seized the moment.
The debut episode featured Archie in all his glory as he used racial epithets never before heard on network TV. The loud and malapropism-prone Archie also touched on subjects such as atheism, the virtues of premarital celibacy, the breakdown of law and order, long hair on boys and short skirts on girls.
At one point, Archie launched into a heated argument with his son-in-law Mike over whether Black people had been denied their share of the American dream.
Mike: Now I suppose you’re going to tell me that the Black man has had the same opportunity in this country as you.
Archie: More — he’s had more! I didn’t have no million people out there marching and protesting to get me my job.
Edith: No, his uncle got it for him.
For five consecutive seasons — from October 1971 to April 1976 — “All in the Family” was the No. 1-rated program. In all, the show would earn four Emmys for outstanding comedy series, and Lear would win a 1977 Peabody Award “for giving us comedy with a social conscience.”
Along with his reputation as a prolific television producer, Lear earned praise and condemnation as a TV trailblazer whose sitcoms toppled taboos in their treatment of then-controversial topics such as LGBTQ+ rights, abortion and infidelity.
The energetic producer was profiled on “60 Minutes” and invited to host “Saturday Night Live.” He also was named on President Nixon’s infamous “Enemies List.”
Lear [had also] incurred the wrath of the religious right, which characterized him as a corrupter of American decency for injecting LGBTQ+ rights, abortion and other controversial topics into his comedy shows. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the late leader of the Moral Majority, called Lear “the No. 1 enemy of the American family.”
In 1981, Lear and others founded People for the American Way, a nonprofit organization formed, according to Lear’s website, “to speak out for Bill of Rights guarantees and to monitor violations of constitutional freedoms.”
After Lear and his wife paid $8.1 million for a rare original copy of the Declaration of Independence in 2000, Lear launched what he called the “biggest production of my life”: a nationwide tour of the historical document, from 2001 until the presidential election of 2004.