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.
One of the most successful and influential producers in television history, Lear died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles, said his publicist, Lara Bergthold.
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.
Lear’s success as a television producer and show developer was such that after he accepted an Emmy for “All in the Family” as outstanding comedy series in 1972 — one of seven Emmys the landmark show won that year — Johnny Carson quipped: “I understand Norman has just sold his acceptance speech as a new series.”
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 controversial topics such as LGBTQ+ rights, abortion and infidelity.
“Norman Lear has held up a mirror to American society and changed the way we look at it,” President Clinton said when Lear received the National Medal of Arts in 1999.
Lear, whose resume included three years writing for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis on “The Colgate Comedy Hour” in the early 1950s, teamed with director and producer Yorkin in late 1958 and formed Tandem Productions.
Over the next decade, they executive-produced “The Andy Williams Show” and produced TV specials that were written by Lear and directed by Yorkin, including ones starring Bobby Darin, Danny Kaye and Henry Fonda.
They also made half a dozen movies, including the Yorkin-directed “Divorce American Style” (which earned Lear an Oscar nomination for his screenplay) and “Cold Turkey” (which Lear wrote, produced and directed).
Then came “All in the Family,” a situation comedy unlike any that had preceded it on American TV.
Yorkin said in interviews that he saw a hit British sitcom called “Till Death Us Do Part” and was so blown away that he sent Lear a copy of the controversial show, whose reactionary and bigoted working-class main character constantly argued with his young, left-wing son-in-law.
The British show’s two verbally sparring male characters struck a chord with Lear, who recalled having similar battles with his own father.
Lear’s father, Herman, also was known to punctuate noisy arguments with Lear’s mother by yelling at her, “Jeanette, stifle! Will you stifle yourself?”
“I was flooded with ideas,” Lear wrote in his book, “and knew I had to do an American version of this show.”
Tandem Productions obtained the rights to the British series, and Lear wrote a script for a pilot commissioned by ABC that introduced the soon-to-be-famous working-class family living in the New York City borough of Queens, with Carroll O’Connor cast as the bigoted, opinionated and relentlessly argumentative Archie Bunker and Jean Stapleton as his loving, sweet-natured wife, Edith.
The taping of the 1968 pilot generated big laughs from the live studio audience, but ABC passed on it, as well as a second pilot made for the network in 1969, 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 and the emerging feminist movement.
CBS seized the moment. And, despite the network’s own concerns and a commitment for only 13 episodes, “All in the Family” debuted as a midseason replacement on Jan. 12, 1971 — a Tuesday.
By then, a third set of young actors had been brought in to play the Bunkers’ daughter, Gloria, and Gloria’s ultra-liberal college-student husband, Mike Stivic (“Meathead” to Archie): Sally Struthers and Rob Reiner.
The chemistry among the four, Lear later said, “was made in heaven.”
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.
