One Laugh at a Time: Norman Lear Created the Model for the Modern Sitcom
But I shouldn’t have worried. As sharp as he was, he would always make you feel good. Norman shared his enormous heart with everybody. He’d say to me, “I want you to know, every time I see you, I feel better.” And then he would say, “I love you, Brian.” He had to have said, “I love you,” to so many, many people. He had so much love to share. And was never stingy with it.
Norman was a man that personally had no chip on his shoulder. That’s why he was able to have complete empathy for others. And he knew the pathway to enlighten the audiences — through comedy. You’re able to accept it because it wouldn’t be didactic or preaching in any way. If it’s a comedy, you’re being entertained, and your message is somehow encased in that. Of course, comedians like Richard Pryor and Don Rickles did versions of that. But no one else was doing it on television. Norman was an expert at being able to expand people’s emotional bandwidth and intellectual might.
I do “curiosity conversations” once a week with Nobel laureates and scientists from all over the world. And just when I think I can entertain Norman by talking about all of these people, he says to me, “Wait a minute — watch this! I had this AI character come to my house, and I interacted with her.” He showed me this AI talking to him, engaging with him. It was spectacular. We were always enlightened by Norman. Norman was endlessly curious, a lifelong learner. And he was gifted enough as an artist to assimilate everything he learned into hit television shows.
Norman was always someone you looked up to as a role model. With our politics so mangled at this point, we don’t have a guiding light or conscience anymore that we had with Norman. That light just went out. And that’s truly sad. Norman Lear was a national treasure, without a doubt.
— As told to Michael Schneider
Oscar-winning producer Brian Grazer is the co-founder of Imagine Entertainment and has been behind film and TV hits including “A Beautiful Mind,” “Empire” and “Apollo 13.”
It’s rare that a creator is lucky enough to see their work come back in style, getting the chance to observe their own influence. It’s rarer still that they get to participate in that revival. The career of producer, writer and political activist Norman Lear was exceptional in countless ways, most famously for seizing third rails like abortion and racial prejudice on the airwaves. Yet there’s also the longevity and vitality — not only of Lear himself, who died last week at 101 and remained active almost to the end, but also his work, a signature style of issue-driven, emotional-realist comedy that saw a resurgence in his final decades. The most obvious example of this longevity is “One Day at a Time.” In its first incarnation, the series was part of the wave of TV productions — including “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons,” “Sanford and Son” and “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” — that made Lear the medium’s defining voice throughout the 1970s. In its second, the show was reimagined as the made-for-streaming story of a Cuban American family in 2010s Los Angeles. Both revolved around a single mother and her children, a twist on the nuclear family in keeping with Lear’s M.O. of representing real people rather than sanitized tropes. And both involved Lear, who remained a hands-on presence and resource for reboot creators Mike Royce and Gloria Calderón Kellett well into his 90s. (Beginning in 2019, he also began collaborating with Jimmy Kimmel on “Live in Front of a Studio Audience,” occasional specials re-creating classic sitcom episodes, including his own.)
While their relationship to Lear was less direct, other shows signaled a larger return to his socially conscious approach. At a time when outlets like Netflix were starting to disrupt TV’S status quo, “Black-ish,” “The Carmichael Show” and “Fresh off the Boat” served as reminders of what broadcast could do best: present a mass audience with a mirror, using the intimacy of a family unit to explore the divisions of a wider culture. The election of America’s first Black president, followed immediately by that of a bigoted aspiring autocrat, put those divisions front and center — and the nation in the same mood as in Lear’s heyday, when war and impeachment and reproductive rights also were in the headlines.
Beginning with the Bunkers, especially the tensions between irascible patriarch Archie (Carroll O’connor) and his bleeding-heart son-in-law Michael (Rob Reiner), Lear zeroed in on the family as a metaphor for our fractious democracy, its citizens stuck together despite their deep-seated differences. Taste is cyclical, and this template fell out of fashion in the more outwardly apolitical, irony-obsessed 1990s, the last decade when Lear had original shows on the air. (Think of “Seinfeld” and its famous credo: “No hugging, no learning.”) But no society could ever outlive the usefulness of mediating hot-button issues through funny, empathetic entertainment, so Lear’s ethos came full circle within his lifetime.
Now that lifetime has ended, and while the ensuing tributes are deserved, they also feel redundant. Lear’s legacy is in the entire idiom he introduced to television, a mode that proved the medium’s potential for grounding fraught, sensitive questions in characters who earn our trust and affection over years spent in our living rooms. Long before cable series like “The Sopranos” or “Sex and the City” shocked audiences by breaking taboos around violence and sex, Lear’s sitcoms did the same within the confines of network standards and practices. More than half a century after “All in the Family” made it to air, its successors still surround us. Take “Abbott Elementary,” a workplace comedy that juxtaposes classroom high jinks with educational policy. You can draw a straight line from the Bunkers’ living room to the Abbott teachers’ lounge, and certainly far beyond.