I learned about the television industry the hard way as a kid. One Monday night in 1968, I turned on the TV to watch my favorite show, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. For three and a half years, I’d enjoyed the global adventures of the two coolest spies ever, Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn) and Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum), and I could hardly wait to see them once again. But then, instead of the U.N.C.L.E. logo, came a loud, fast, video-taped “variety show” (look up the once-common series term) called Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. This — to me — obnoxious program instantly became one of the biggest hits of the decade and marked the beginning of “relevant” television. The genre exploded three years later with the first TV production of Norman Lear, who died Tuesday at the age of 101.
The teen me disliked All in the Family as much as I’d deplored Laugh-In, and I wasn’t even political then. Something about the cheap-looking videotape, unvarying living-room obvious set, excessive canned laughter and reactions (“Ooh!”) turned me off — plus the fact that none of the annoying, unglamorous, insolent characters appeared to like each other. But I was a distinct silent minority as the show kicked off “must-see TV” Saturday night on CBS. Even many of my friends pretended to chortle at the non-antics of the Bunker household. This included literal bathroom humor as the first TV series in which you could hear a toilet flush.
The success of All in the Family — building on Laugh-In’s breakout liberal humor — shaped television comedy for the rest of the decade. Yet the show ironically achieved its success by defying rather than fulfilling Lear’s original vision. Lear created Archie Bunker as the ultimate conservative bogeyman — a regressive, ignorant, blue-collar, homophobic Christian racist. The audience would then regularly laugh at Archie through the smug, superior putdowns of his progressive college-educated son-in-law, Michael, the avatar for Lear.
More than anyone in Hollywood today, Norman Lear earned the right to knock conservative orthodoxy. He was a World War II hero pilot who flew a stunning 52 missions over Nazi-occupied Europe. Nonetheless, you can see his contempt toward tradition and family as early as 1967 in his co-written feature film Divorce American Style. It opens with a conductor on a suburban hill waving his baton at the sounds of intermarriage-fighting in each house. The anti-marriage screed actually managed to make Dick Van Dyke and Debbie Reynolds unlikable.
Lear sought to bring a similar hostility to the small screen through Archie Bunker. But he made one consequential mistake, although a very lucrative one. He cast Carroll O’Connor as Archie. A brilliant character actor, O’Connor read the lines as written, but then he added virtues not on the script page, like heart, soul, and patriotism. He communicated Archie’s love for his wife, Edith (Jean Stapleton), even when insulting her (“dingbat”); for his daughter, Gloria (Sally Struthers); for God and his country. And he conveyed his disdain for son-in-law, Michael (Rob Reiner), for leeching off his largesse while preaching about higher values.
Much to Lear’s shock and success, viewers loved Archie and mocked “Meathead” (Michael) along with him. Archie’s strong paternal presence emotionally dwarfed his creator’s liberal moralizing. Instead of the left-wing lesson Lear intended, All in the Family became a pseudo-traditionalist family show. So much so that when Jean Stapleton quit the show in 1980, Lear killed Edith off and opportunistically established the $500,000 Edith Bunker Memorial Fund for the ERA and Women’s Rights. This was an early example of the liberal creed “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
But long before this, with All in the Family still a blockbuster, Lear produced an insufferable spinoff, Maude, giving the lead character of Edith’s assertive cousin (Bea Arthur) none of Archie’s warmth. Maude was Lear’s ideal woman: an unattractive, abrasive, annoying shrew. And if that was too subtle for the audience, Lear made sure she would make television history as the first series lead to have an abortion — in November 1972, two months before Roe v. Wade constitutionalized the atrocity.
Maude puttered along for six years thanks to the All in the Family engine and the sex-symbol-hood of popularly large-breasted Adrienne Barbeau as Maude’s daughter, Carol. Lear was a feminist but not a fool. His other assaultive female-driven series, One Day at a Time, proved more durable, lasting halfway into the eighties. But it’s almost unwatchable today, sadly most remembered for the drug troubles of young co-star Mackenzie Phillips.
However, three black-led shows powered by superb male comedians broke the Lear liberal jerk mold, one briefly before Lear ruined it. Good Times depicted the poor inner-city family of Maude’s maid, Florida (a soulful Esther Rolle). Jimmie Walker as Florida’s son “J.J.” was a breakout star, but even he couldn’t save the series when Lear chose to kill off the strong family patriarch (an excellent John Amos). Black groups begged Lear not to diminish the rare united black family model, but he did, and the show died soon after Amos’s character did.
A memorable theme song and the amusing Sherman Hemsley kept Archie Bunker’s former neighbors, The Jeffersons, on the air for 10 years. But Lear did make one brilliant contribution to great television comedy, Sanford and Son, partly by omitting all ideological messaging and mostly due to its comic genius star, Redd Foxx. It’s the only Lear show that you can laugh with today instead of endure.
Not coincidentally, Lear’s televisionary influence, and that of his untalented imitators, ended rather abruptly in 1980 with the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan and the new conservatism. Lear co-founded the People for the American Way to combat these forces, but he could have saved his time and money. The Bushes did much of his work for him. Lear’s greatest success in the eighties was as executive producer of the apolitical classic The Princess Bride.
By the time he reentered the TV arena in the ’90s, audience tastes had changed — to richer comedies like Cheers and Seinfeld — and his shows flopped. But Lear made his mark in the medium, and now he’s movin’ on up.