Norman Lear died Tuesday in Los Angeles at 101. A spokesman for his family said the cause was natural causes. The producer had put bigots, feminists and family arguments on prime-time television in the 1970s and made audiences laugh at them.
His centerpiece was Archie Bunker, the cranky patriarch of “All in the Family” (1971-79). Carroll O’Connor played him as a man who could be racist and sexist and still be loved by his family. Lear based the character on his own father. In one scene, Archie asks a Black man whether God is white. “What makes you think God isn’t Black?” comes the reply. Archie answers that he was made in God’s image and “I ain’t Black.”
The show argued about everything. Archie fought with his liberal son-in-law, Michael “Meathead” Stivic, played by Rob Reiner, over the era’s most contentious subjects, with an intensity rarely seen in a network sitcom. It flailed in its first season. It became one of the most popular and critically admired shows of the decade, and Lear won four Emmys and a Peabody for it.
Spin-offs and taboo topics
Lear and his producing partner Bud Yorkin followed it with a run of topical comedies. “Maude” (1972-78), starring Bea Arthur, was a spin-off. In it, the title character, nearly 50, finds she is pregnant and decides to have an abortion. Lear told the Archive of American Television that, having explored every alternative, “it just wasn’t in our nature, by that time, to wish to take the easy way.”
“Sanford and Son,” “Good Times” and “The Jeffersons” were all norm-breaking portraits of Black family life. “Good Times” has been called the first show with a two-parent Black household. “The Jeffersons” followed a wealthy Black couple who moved to a “deluxe apartment in the sky,” with an interracial couple as neighbors. Critics said all three leaned on stereotypical character traits. “One Day at a Time” ran from 1975 to 1984 and was remade in 2017 with a Latino cast.
Before the early 1970s, NPR TV critic Eric Deggans said, executives insisted viewers wanted escapism. Lear showed they would watch characters talk about the real world. His shows took on racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, abortion, the Vietnam War and class conflict.
From Connecticut to the Air Forces
Lear was born July 27, 1922, in New Haven, Connecticut. When he was 9, his father was arrested and imprisoned for selling fake bonds. “The night that he was taken away, there were a ton of people at the house, and somebody puts their hand on my shoulder, and says, ‘You’re the man of the house now, Norman,’” Lear told PBS NewsHour in 2017. “What a fool that person was.”
He dropped out of Emerson College in 1942 to join the U.S. Army Air Forces as a radio operator and gunner. After the war he worked in public relations, then broke into comedy writing in the early 1950s with Ed Simmons, producing sketches for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. His first series, in 1959, was the Western “The Deputy,” starring Henry Fonda. He also made films, among them “Come Blow Your Horn” and “Cold Turkey,” which he directed. In the late 1980s he produced three Reiner-directed films: “The Sure Thing,” “Stand by Me” and “The Princess Bride.”
Activism and honors
In the early 1980s, Lear founded People for the American Way, a nonprofit meant to counter the rising Christian right, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in particular. It helped with voter registration and opposed religious conservatism in politics. In the early 2000s he bought a copy of the Declaration of Independence for a national tour.
His honors included six Emmys, a Peabody Lifetime Achievement Award, a National Medal of Arts, induction into the Television Academy Hall of Fame and the Carol Burnett Award at the virtual Golden Globes in February 2021. Accepting that one, he thanked his family. “At close to 99, I can tell you that I’ve never lived alone, I’ve never laughed alone, and that has as much to do with my being here today as anything else I know,” he said.
Tributes came from Jimmy Kimmel and “Abbott Elementary” creator Quinta Brunson. On the night of his death, five networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and The CW, ran a brief visual tribute, a first. Lear is survived by his wife, Lyn Davis Lear, five daughters and a son, and four grandchildren.
Sources
- Norman Lear, boundary-breaking TV master behind ‘All in the Family’ and progressive activist, dies at 101
- The legacy of visionary TV producer Norman Lear, dead at 101
