It is hard to overemphasize just how shocked the world was after All in the Family, Norman Lear’s sitcom about a lovable bigot living in Astoria, premiered in January 1971. “A wretched program,” scathed Life magazine. Even the president of the United States was disgusted, convinced it was promoting a bisexual agenda. “I think the son-in-law, obviously, apparently goes both ways,” Richard Nixon told H.R. Haldeman in a secretly recorded White House tape.
For all the awards Lear received over his lifetime—six Emmys (including three in just the last few years for his Live in Front of a Studio Audience specials), a Peabody, and a National Medal of Honor, to name a few—Lear, who “passed away peacefully” on Tuesday at 101, according to his family, was no doubt proudest of being despised by Nixon. After all, neither Life’s nor the soon to be disgraced president’s opinion would be shared by the general public. They flocked to the outspoken liberal’s reality-filled, agenda-pushing comedies to a degree that is almost unfathomable today: By the end of the ’74-’75 season, Lear had developed five of the top 10 Nielsen rated shows.
“Norman lived a life in awe of the world around him. He marveled at his cup of coffee every morning, the shape of the tree outside his window, and the sounds of beautiful music. But it was people—those he just met and those he knew for decades—who kept his mind and heart forever young,” the family added in a statement. “As we celebrate his legacy and reflect on the next chapter of life without him, we would like to thank everyone for all the love and support.”
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What set Lear apart was not simply his popularity, it was his content. During a period when television was whitewashing the cultural revolution and urban strife that was engulfing the country, Lear embraced it, tackling racism, poverty, feminism, and every other issue that was alighting conversations around the formica-topped kitchen tables of the 1970s.
“Norman Lear took television away from dopey wives and dumb fathers, from the pimps, hookers, hustlers, private eyes, junkies, cowboys and rustlers that constituted television chaos,” said the late screenwriter and novelist Paddy Chayefsky. “In their place, [he] put the American people. He took the audience and put them on the set.”
Lear’s greatest innovation in creating shows like The Jeffersons, Good Times, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and Maude wasn’t simply giving TV shows a political voice, it was acknowledging that they had always had one and it was utterly toxic and out of touch.
“Who said comedies that proceeded All in the Family had no point of view?” Lear wrote in his 2014 autobiography, Even This I Get to Experience. “The overwhelming majority of them were about families whose biggest problem was, ‘The roast is ruined and the boss is coming to dinner!’ Talk about messaging. For twenty years, TV comedy was telling us there was no hunger in America, we had no racial discrimination, there was no unemployment or inflation, no war, no drugs, and the citizenry was happy with whomever happened to be in the White House. Tell me that expressed no point of view!”
Lear’s work not only reflected the world around him but also was profoundly personal. Born to a Jewish family in New Haven, Connecticut, Lear based his greatest success on his relationship with his father, a traveling salesman who was convicted of selling fake bonds when Lear was 9 and spent two years in prison.
“I read that there was a show in England called Till Death Us Do Part, about a bigot and his son or son-in-law,” Lear told Deadline. “I didn’t have to see anything or know anything. I grew up with a father who called me the laziest white kid he ever met, and my God, how had I never thought of that? So I knew I had it—or at least I knew I had what to start on.”
He went to Emerson College in Boston but dropped out after Pearl Harbor to join the Air Force and ended up flying 52 combat missions. After the war, he had brief stints as a publicist and door-to-door salesman before getting his start in comedy writing.
From the beginning, Lear, who was nominated for an Academy Award along with Robert Kaufman for their script for 1967’s Divorce American Style, had a clear comic philosophy: always keep it real. “To me, laughter lacks depth if it isn’t involved with other emotions,” wrote Lear. “An audience is entertained when it’s involved to the point of laughter or tears—ideally both.”
Shortly after All in The Family, Lear helped change the racial landscape of network television when he developed Sanford and Son, also based on a British import, around Vegas stand-up Redd Foxx. Lear gave feminism one of its first pop culture footholds when he took Edith Bunker’s Westchester liberal cousin Maude Findlay, played by Bea Arthur, and gave her own TV show.
In Maude, Lear, who had counted among his friends Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, created a character not only closest to him in personality, but one that was more threatening to the status quo than either Archie Bunker or Meathead. “Men who perceived their male dominance being pissed on wanted her dead,” wrote Lear.
In a famous two-part episode that aired two months before the passage of Roe v. Wade, Maude chose to have an abortion rather than become a parent again at 47. The powers that be tried to silence Lear, but he and his shows had become too powerful to stop. “Thirty-nine affiliates declined to air the reruns and, most telling of all, not one corporate sponsor bought commercial airtime on these broadcasts,” he wrote.
Unsurprisingly, Lear was a frontline soldier for the First Amendment and for civil liberties, founding the People for the American Way in 1981 to monitor right-wing activities and to fight to keep religion out of public policy. In 2001, he and his wife bought one of the few remaining copies of the Declaration of Independence for $8.1 million and brought it on a cross-country tour so ordinary citizens could get up close and personal with what he called “America’s birth certificate.”
While Lear’s shows haven’t dominated pop culture in decades (in the last decade, he had been advocating a sitcom about senior citizens called Guess Who Died?), he stayed active in politics, speaking out against Rudy Giuliani’s attacks against President Obama or in support of the Occupy movement.
And in recent years he was never shy about sharing his harsh opinions of Donald Trump, telling The Daily Beast as early as December 2015 that the then-presidential hopeful was a “fool and an asshole” who had “become the middle finger” on the right hand of his supporters. “It’s a ‘fuck you’ to the establishment. It isn’t a heartfelt belief in this guy,” he said at the time.
Pushing back on the comparisons between Trump and his most iconic character, Archie Bunker, just a few weeks before the 2016 election, Lear added, “Archie Bunker was far wiser of heart. Sure, the thoughts he held were antediluvian. But Donald Trump is a thorough fool, having nothing to do with the shrewdness that has allowed him to cheat and steal the way he has for his own good. Underneath that, he is a fool.”
For someone so outspoken, Lear considered himself a uniter, one whose jokes reminded an often divided country that the “others” people were so suspicious of had more in common with them then they realized. “My bumper sticker reads ‘Just Another Version of You,’ and I believe it,” he said in 2014. “America’s forgotten that and thinks it’s God’s chosen and it behaves that way too often—and I say that with as much love as I think can exist for the country I was born in.”
