NEW YORK — In many American living rooms, the 1960s really began on January 12, 1971.
That was the night the comedy “All in the Family” debuted, almost instantly changing television and American society. Creator Norman Lear, who died Tuesday at the age of 101, was the man behind that transformation.
The series introduced brash bigot Archie Bunker, his dingbat wife Edith, his feminist daughter Gloria, and his liberal son-in-law Mike Stivic. From their home in the New York borough of Queens, they lived loudly next to each other and watched as the world spun out of control.
Archie Bunker, played by Carroll O'Connor, embodied the “American Way”—as most middle-aged white Americans understood it at the time—and watched with confused exasperation as “others” redefined it.
After a tumultuous decade of fundamental change, in the midst of a controversial war abroad, these realities were hardly foreign to most Americans. They rarely saw them return to television after dinnertime, after the nightly news was over.
Television was just in its infancy at the time. Most people had only one set in their home – my family had switched from black and white to color less than two years ago – and viewers watched the same handful of over-the-air channels. Television programmers — closely watched by network censors and the Federal Communications Commission — rarely address topics that risk upsetting anyone.
“Before 'All in the Family,' television comedy was a vast playground for witches, Martians and crazy ladies who constantly dressed in disguises or mistook their husband's boss for the milkman,” Aljean Hermetz wrote in The New York Times in 1972.
“Relationships were ruthlessly stapled out of cardboard and then wrapped in cellophane with professional-looking bows,” Hermetz wrote. “The few non-plastic comedies were gentle and relatively melodramatic and contained no meanness.”
Bunker was incredulous when a black neighbor portrayed Santa Claus – after all, he reasoned, everyone knew Santa Claus was white. He was shocked when Sammy Davis Jr. kissed him on the cheek. England, he said, was a “fag country” – a word you wouldn't hear on network television these days. Even the sound of a toilet flushing was new to TV at the time.
Menopause, miscarriage, marital problems – it was all fair game. Viewers learned to face reality and their differences and find things to laugh about.
“I never considered the shows groundbreaking,” Lear told the Harvard Business Review in 2014, “because every American understood so easily what they were about. The problems lay around their dinner tables. The language was on their schoolyards. It was nothing new.”
The show was such a success, and so quickly, that in 1972 the liberal lead character in Lear's sitcom “Maude” decided to have an abortion — the year before the Supreme Court legalized abortion with the Roe v. Wade decision.
It was not without controversy. Lear asked TV Guide and other publications not to include “abortion” in their pre-show recaps. Two CBS stations in Illinois did not air it. The station didn't want to air it either, until Lear told them they had to find another show for their Tuesday night program.
That was the power Lear had at the time. In the 1974-1975 season he was behind five of the ten most watched programs. And in the 1970s, Lear used that power, whether it was race, gender or single parenthood, to create other sitcoms that reflected worlds rarely, if ever, seen on television.
There was the junkyard owner, memorably portrayed by comedian Redd Foxx in “Sanford and Son” (“This is the big one, Elizabeth,” he would say, clutching his chest and pretending to have a heart attack). There was the struggling black family in the Chicago projects in “Good Times” (with the “dy-no-mite” son played by Jimmie Walker).
And most memorable of all was the ambitious Black family acclimating to a “deluxe apartment in the sky” in Manhattan in “The Jeffersons,” a series introduced each week with the unforgettable theme song “Movin' on Up.”
Actress Bonnie Franklin showed viewers the struggles and triumphs of a single mother raising two daughters in “One Day at a Time,” a series that made Valerie Bertinelli America's darling.
It was a series of creative and commercial successes that were never quite matched – certainly not by Lear, who had his share of later strikeouts and, to a younger generation, became better known as a liberal activist.
However, the candor and comedy he brought to the airwaves in the 1970s sealed his status, and any television show with realism at its core owes Norman Lear a debt.
Lear lived until he was 101 and lived long enough to see his work appreciated by those who did not experience it the first time. “One Day at a Time,” for example, was remade from 2017 to 2020 with a Cuban family at its center. And Jimmy Kimmel lovingly helped produce television versions of some of Lear's classic scripts, played by current stars.
Somehow it worked. The exercise proved the durability of his scripts – and, far from sounding dated, how much of what they discussed is still relevant today.
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David Bauder, the media writer for The Associated Press, has covered television for more than 25 years. Follow him at http://twitter.com/dbauder