Norman Lear
Jewish producer who helped transform 20 -century American TV comedy th
ONE OF the great figures of American television comedy in the late 20th century, Norman Lear, who has died in his Los Angeles home aged 101, was astonishingly prolific, producing, writing or developing more than 100 shows. But he is best known for a series of 1970s sitcoms including All in the Family (1971– 1979), Maude (1972–1978), Sanford and Son (1972–1977), Good Times (1974–1979), One Day at a Time (1975–1984) and The Jeffersons (1975–1985).
Norman Milton Lear was born in New Haven, Connecticut, part of that extraordinary generation of JewishAmerican figures that included Sid Caesar, Joseph Heller and Lenny Bruce. His parents, Jeanette (née Seicol) and Hyman “Herman” Lear, a travelling salesman, were of Russian-Jewish descent and he had a Jewish upbringing. He had a younger sister, Claire Lear Brown (1925–2015).
Lear grew up during the New Deal. But he said the moment that inspired his lifetime as a liberal political activist was when he first came across the antisemitic Catholic radio priest Charles Coughlin. He later attended Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn, graduated from Weaver High School in Hartford, Connecticut and attended Emerson College in Boston, but dropped out in 1942 to join the United States Army Air Forces. He served in the Mediterranean, flew 52 combat missions and was discharged in 1945.
After the war, Lear moved to California and worked first in public relations and then became a door-to-door salesman. He then teamed up with a friend, Ed Simmons, during the 1950s and wrote TV comedy sketches for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Rowan and Martin and other leading figures. Then in 1971 came his big breakthrough, All in the Family (CBS), which won several prestigious Emmy Awards in its first year, including Outstanding Comedy Series.
The show, an American version of the BBC’s Till Death Us Do Part, was about a blue-collar bigot, Archie Bunker, his long-suffering wife Edith, and their liberal daughter and son-in-law (played by Rob Reiner, later a hugely successful film director) and it became the toprated show on American TV for the next five years. The sequel, Archie Bunker’s Place, which saw Edith Stapleton and Carroll O’Connor reprise their roles as Edith and Archie in the original series, was equally successful, running for four seasons from 1979-83.
Lear’s second big TV sitcom, Sanford and Son (NBC), was also based on a British sitcom, Steptoe and Son. Lear changed the setting to the Watts section of Los Angeles and the characters to African-Americans, and the show was an instant hit. It included special guests BB King, George Foreman, The Three Degrees and Lena Horne. The first five series all came in the top ten and the show ran for 136 episodes. Numerous hit shows followed, including Maude (with Bea Arthur, later of Golden Girls fame), The Jeffersons, (both spinoffs of All in the Family), One Day at a Time, and Good Times (a spinoff of Maude), America’s first African-American two-parent family sitcom.
Most used a live studio audience, and dealt with the social and political issues of the day at a time of widespread social unrest: civil rights, Vietnam and Watergate. Maude starred Bea Arthur as Maude Findlay, a “limousine liberal”, an outspoken, middle-aged, champion of women’s liberation, civil rights and racial equality, living in suburban Tuckahoe, New York with her fourth husband (played by Bill Macy). Maude’s deep, raspy voice is a running gag, explaining in one episode, when she answers the phone, “No, this is not Mr. Findlay; this is Mrs Findlay! Mr. Findlay has a much higher voice.”
Lear’s longtime producing partner was Bud Yorkin, who also produced All in the Family, Sanford and Son, What’s Happening!!, Maude, and The Jeffersons. Yorkin split with Lear in 1975. Lear also developed the cult TV series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, starring Louise Lasser, about an Ohio housewife unable to cope with her daily life. It was turned down by the networks for being “too controversial” and placed into first-run syndication with 128 stations in January 1976.
According to The New York Times, “The dreams and nightmares of the American people are reflected darkly through the glass of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.” It ran for 325 episodes.
Around the same time came The Jeffersons, broadcast on CBS from 18 January, which became one of the longest-running sitcoms in American TV history, the second-longest-running series with a primarily African-American cast, and the first to prominently feature a married interracial couple. The show is about George and Louise Jefferson, a prosperous black couple who moved from Queens to Manhattan owing to the success of his drycleaning chain, Jefferson Cleaners. It anticipates The Cosby Show (1984-92), also about a well-off black family. It ended in 1985 and was Lear’s last major TV hit.
In 1980, Lear launched the organisation People for the American Way, to counter the Christian rightwing group the Moral Majority, founded in 1979. Lear changed American television. Before All in the Family, TV sitcoms portrayed white family life as comfortable and avoided raising issues about race and women’s lives. But Lear was in the right place at the right time. His career took off just when America was divided over all kinds of new issues. Beginning in 1971, All in the Family engaged with social and political topics of the day and Lear’s subsequent shows took on issues about race and gender. But despite his Jewish origins, the 1970s was not yet a time for writing about Jews. In that sense, Lear was pre-Seinfeld and pre-Larry David.
Television screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky said that Lear “took the audience and put them on the set”. In 1999, Bill Clinton awarded Lear the National Medal of Arts, saying: “Norman Lear has held up a mirror to American society and changed the way we look at it.” He received numerous awards and became the oldest recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors at the age of 95. But perhaps his greatest legacy was that, along with Steven Bochco, he changed the face of American TV in the age before Netflix, when the old networks were still king.
Lear was married three times, first to Charlotte Rosen in 1943. They divorced in 1956. He then married Frances Loeb from 1956 to 1985 (she received $112 million from Lear in their divorce settlement). In 1987 he married producer Lyn Davis, who survives him. From his three marriages, he had six children. Billy Crystal wrote: “We have lost a giant... He used laughter to look at ourselves. A blessing to have been his friend for almost 50 years.”
Rob Reiner paid this tribute: “There’s a Yiddish word that describes Norman’s genius: It’s kochleffel. For all you non-Jews out there, kochleffel is a ladle, a ladle that stirs the pot. And when Norman, the kochleffel, stirred that pot, he wound up changing American culture.”
Norman Milton Lear, born 27 July, 1922. Died 5 December, 2023