Norman Lear, who changed the face — and faces — of TV by mixing controversial topics with comedy in the 1970s, will be saluted with a one-hour primetime special at 8 p.m. tonight on CBS. Lear died Tuesday at age 101.
His All In The Family (1971-79), Maude (1972-78) Sanford and Son (1972-77), Good Times (1974-79) and One Day At A Time (1975-84) all were huge hits on CBS.
Norman Lear: A Life on Television produced by Entertainment Tonight features new interviews with Jimmie Walker (Good Times) and Mackenzie Phillips (One Day At A Time); clips from the ET archives; and Lear reflecting on his career in an interview last year with ET host Kevin Frazier conducted when Lear celebrated his 100th birthday.
PBS' 2016 American Masters profile of Lear, Just Another Version of You, also airs tonight at 9 p.m. on Dayton's WPTD-TV and 10 p.m. on @KET (Channel 54).
The Television Hall of Fame member received six Primetime Emmy Awards, the National Medal of Arts in 1999, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2017, the Golden Globe Carol Burnett Award in 2021 and two Peabody Awards.
"He revolutionized and democratized a traditionally timid, overwhelmingly white-bread medium with a collection of recognizable, risible characters whose racial and gender diversity was as unprecedented as their biases and brash opinions," said the Peabody Awards Board of Jurorsin announcing an individual award to Lear presented at the 76th annual Peabody Awards ceremony in 2017.
"From All in the Family and Sanford and Son to Maude, Good Times, and The Jeffersons, all the Lear hits shared, to one degree or another, a grounding in the real, polarized America we all knew, not some fantasy nation crawling with dreamy genies, twitchy witches and friendly Martians," the jurors continued. "In Lear’s watershed shows of the ‘70s, no topic was too touchy to tackle — not racial discrimination, not sexism, not homosexuality, not abortion, not even rape. Better than anyone working in television, Lear has created an influential body of work that politicized the personal, personalized the political, and showed us ourselves in all our ridiculousness and nobility."
NPR's Steve Inskeep put it this way earlier this week:
"It can be hard today to grasp just how much Lear revolutionized network television. He worked social commentary into sitcoms that usually avoided it. In the network TV of the 1960s, Andy Griffith played the sheriff of a Southern town, and whatever the virtues of that nostalgic show, it never touched the civil rights struggles of the real-life American South that were going on at the same time. That was normal TV.
"In the 1970s, Norman Lear's All In The Family absolutely did reference the social divisions of the time," said Inskeep before playing a clip of Archie Bunker, a white New York City man played by Carroll O'Connor, who encounters the Black entertainer Sammy Davis Jr.
"All In the Family wasn't afraid to laugh at the kinds of remarks that might otherwise bring an uncomfortable silence to the room. It was an enormous hit and inspired a spinoff built around a Black family, The Jefferson's.'"
Norman Lear: A Life on Television will also be streaming on Paramount+ live and on demand for Paramount+ with Showtime subscribers, or on demand for Paramount+ Essential subscribers on Saturday, Dec. 9.
