Mike: Now I suppose you’re going to tell me that the Black man has had the same opportunity in this country as you.Īrchie: More - he’s had more! I didn’t have no million people out there marching and protesting to get me my job. Now, the society he depicted is so polarized that love of debate seems quaint.Īt one point, Archie launched into a heated argument with his son-in-law Mike over whether Black people had been denied their share of the American dream. In his comedies, Norman Lear made disagreement a form of patriotism. Television Why ‘All in the Family’ would be all but impossible to pull off today And, despite the network’s own concerns and a commitment for only 13 episodes, “All in the Family” debuted as a midseason replacement on Jan. The taping of the 1968 pilot generated big laughs from the live studio audience, but ABC passed on it, as well as a second pilot made for the network in 1969, deciding that the show’s potentially offensive language and content would be inappropriate in a country already in turmoil over the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, racism and the emerging feminist movement.ĬBS seized the moment. Tandem Productions obtained the rights to the British series, and Lear wrote a script for a pilot commissioned by ABC that introduced the soon-to-be-famous working-class family living in the New York City borough of Queens, with Carroll O’Connor cast as the bigoted, opinionated and relentlessly argumentative Archie Bunker and Jean Stapleton as his loving, sweet-natured wife, Edith. Whether you’re figuring out where to start or where to catch up with your old favorites, here are Norman Lear’s 7 most essential TV shows and where to watch them. Television 7 essential Norman Lear TV shows and where to watch them Lear’s success as a television producer and show developer was such that after he accepted an Emmy for “All in the Family” as outstanding comedy series in 1972 - one of seven Emmys the landmark show won that year - Johnny Carson quipped: “I understand Norman has just sold his acceptance speech as a new series.” Indeed, Lear and Yorkin had five of the top 10 programs in the Nielsen ratings for the 1974-75 TV season. In the mid-1970s, it was estimated that some 120 million Americans - more than half the nation’s population at the time- watched the various sitcoms produced by Lear and Bud Yorkin, his longtime partner in Tandem Productions. One of the most successful and influential producers in television history, Lear died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles, said his publicist, Lara Bergthold. Norman Lear, the multiple Emmy-Award-winning writer-producer and liberal political activist who revolutionized prime-time television in the 1970s with groundbreaking, socially relevant situation comedies such as “ All in the Family,” “Maude” and “The Jeffersons,” has died.
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