Norman Lear turned 100 on July 27, and to belatedly mark the occasion, ABC aired a star-encrusted tribute Thursday, "Norman Lear: 100 Years of Music and Laughter." On broadcast television, the producer's home for nearly all his TV career.
The series for which he was best known — including "All in the Family," "Maude" and "The Jeffersons" — were not necessarily my favorite comedies. There was a lot of yelling. (I preferred the becalmed quiet of his formally radical soap opera parody, "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.") But strong memories suggest that I watched them all, along with "Sanford and Son" and "One Day at a Time." And there's no question that these shows, born in an era of war protests, (sometimes militant) liberation movements, presidential malfeasance and an ever-widening generation gap, brought something fresh to the medium, making room for passages of seriousness and emotional depth between the crafted laughs. "Good Times" (created by "Jeffersons" son Mike Evans and Eric Monte) was the first full-on Black family sitcom; no one had seen the likes of Sherman Hemsley's George Jefferson. Lear series have looked at racism, homophobia, misogyny, sexual identity, mental health, addiction, aging, rape, PTSD, immigration, gentrification — if there was a point to make, it would be made.
Many of his shows exist in the same fictional world. Before Marvel and DC extended their universes, there was the spinoff. Maude, who first appeared on "All in the Family," was Edith Bunker's cousin; Florida, from "Good Times" (a spinoff of a spinoff), had been Maude's housekeeper. Before they moved on up to a deluxe East Side apartment, the Jeffersons were the Bunkers' neighbors. Much less successful were "Gloria," with Sally Struthers as the Bunker daughter, out on her own; "Checking In," built around the Jeffersons' former housekeeper, Florence; and "704 Hauser," from Lear's brief return to television in the 1990s, in which a Black family moves into the old Bunker house. "Archie Bunker's Place" was a continuation of "All in the Family"; the faux talk show "Fernwood 2 Night" was a chip off "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman."
