Lear brought realism to TV-sitcom families

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This article was published 09/12/2023 (1011 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Norman Lear, who died on Tuesday at age 101, made revolutionary, rule-breaking television.

But for me, and millions like me who grew up in the 1970s, the shows he created were just part of our childhood landscape. It was only when I grew up and looked back that I realized how radically these shows reacted against what came before and how profoundly they influenced what came after.

Lear was always pushing and pulling — and occasionally failing, spectacularly — while trying to figure out what was possible within the 22-minute sitcom format.

Lear’s hits included Good Times, Maude, The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time, Sanford and Son and especially All in the Family, which was so controversial when it debuted in 1971 that the network (CBS) felt it needed to run a statement about the function of satire. This disclaimer carefully explained that the show wanted to shine a spotlight on prejudice to reveal how absurd it was.

Before Lear, many TV families were affluent, aspirational and middle-class, with a pipe-smoking, middle-management father, a stay-at-home mom who wore pearls and kitten heels even when vacuuming, and 2.5 children. And it wasn’t just the picket fences that were white.

Shows often took place in the idealized suburbs of Leave it to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show or the homespun rural locales of Petticoat Junction and Green Acres.

Lear brought in big-city, blue-collar characters like the Bunkers of All in the Family — loud-mouthed bigot Archie (Carroll O’Connor), his goodhearted wife Edith (Jean Stapleton), their daughter Gloria (Sally Struthers) and her husband Mike (Rob Reiner), an outspoken liberal.

They all lived, loved and bickered in a rowhouse in Queens, where the wallpaper was a little grubby around the light switches and the green kitchen tiles were a bit dingy.

One Day at a Time starred Bonnie Franklin as a divorced single mom raising two girls in a crowded apartment in Indianapolis. Two popular series centred on Black families. The Jeffersons (Sherman Hemsley and Isabel Sanford) started as the Bunkers’ neighbours in Queens, George Jefferson being an equally pig-headed patriarch, before “moving on up” to a fancy Manhattan building in their own show.

In Good Times, the Evans family (led by John Amos and Esther Rolle) is just getting by in a Chicago housing project — in 1974, this was America’s first television show focusing on a two-parent Black household.

Maude, known for her sweeping vests and even more sweeping liberal opinions, lived in an upscale suburb, but one that June Cleaver wouldn’t have recognized, its surfaces ruffled by the social shifts of the ‘70s, especially feminism (back when it was called “women’s lib”).

Lear also wanted to go beyond “the boss is coming to dinner and the roast is burnt” setups. He wanted to depict ordinary family life with a new frankness and realism. His shows looked at money issues and sexual problems. He covered menopause, miscarriage, pregnancy and childbirth. The arrival of Gloria and Michael’s son took us right into the delivery room.

Maude featured the first abortion subplot in an American TV series and also dealt with issues around mental health. One episode is nothing but Maude talking to her analyst, who is glimpsed only from the back and whose sparse dialogue consists in variations on the word “Ah,” making this an early example of the experimental bottle episode.

Lear’s shows reflected their anxious times, when viewers were worried about high inflation, mass layoffs, an energy crisis, the traumas of Watergate and Vietnam. The Bunkers’ living room wasn’t big, but the wide world came through that front door — issues around sexual assault, the war and the draft, civil rights protests, homophobic violence. Good Times tackled housing and evictions, school busing and child abuse.

Using the sitcom format to tackle racism, antisemitism, sexism — the various “isms,” as Lear said — could be tricky. When the creators of Seinfeld famously declared there would be “no hugging and no learning” for their characters, that was partly a reaction against the moral imperatives of Lear’s work.

But these shows would never have been so popular if they weren’t also funny. Lear occasionally resorted to soapboxing, but mostly he worked by sneaking serious ideas into comic and very human interactions.

Of course, some of these shows date back five decades, and certain things in them hit differently — and sometimes uncomfortably — now. Lear’s work opened the door for characters talking about the big issues of race, gender and class on mainstream TV. These days, we’re talking about how they talked about it — a complicated conversation that needs to continue.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com