Norman Lear, And the Use of TV as a Mirror
Prolific TV creator Norman Lear passed away at 101. May his memory be a blessing
Television icon Norman Lear died at 101. He lived a lot of life, and he gave us so much in that lifetime. His television shows did something that television had never done before: it gave us slices of everyday American life. We wouldn’t have the type of TV we have now if it wasn’t for Norman Lear.
Norman and his shows are such a huge part of my childhood and my understanding of how the regular person can influence pop culture and vice versa. His work is timeless in how utterly timely it is. Each show was created in the exact moment it needed to be, but there’s a reason we still celebrate Lear as opposed to some of his television making contemporaries. His shows dared to go there, to lift the curtain on what was really happening in American households, to show audiences that there was always a thread of commonality among us.
If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you know that I was raised by TV. I LOVED old TV shows as a kid; I would stay up late on weekends watching Nick-At-Nite. When they created the channel TV Land, my life was complete. A whole TV channel of shows that had been off the air before I was born? Sign me up. That hasn’t changed, I still prefer to watch TV shows from the 70s and 80s, and I wish more of them were available for streaming.
Lear’s shows were in heavy rotation in my home. I get my love of old TV from my mom, and his show All in the Family was (and still is!) one of her favorites. She watched the show in real time, and apparently, her father (who died before I was born) was a big fan of loveable bigot Archie Bunker. My grandfather hated him, but that didn’t stop him from sitting in his own armchair and watching the show every week. If you watch it now, a lot of what Archie says and does would stop your heart. But first off all, you have to contextualize when the show aired. Secondly, Archie, whether you liked him or not, spoke like a lot of white, cis-het men his age. He didn’t exist in a vacuum, in fact, he was the ultimate definition of an “everyman.” Thanks to the discourse heavy nature of current society, a character like Archie Bunker would never be able to exist if the show was made now. But with Archie, Lear was able to show those everyman-type right wing bigots themselves, and audiences were allowed to see how thoughts like his were becoming outdated thanks to the progress we were making as a society.
All in the Family dealt with some complex subject matter, including LGTBQ issues. One of its most notable storylines included Beverly La Salle, a transgender (then called transvestite) woman. Beverly was treated like a peer and an equal, and her gender was never an issue. The show made the choice to have her die from injuries sustained in an attack that could be considered a hate crime. Her death leads Edith, a firm believer in God, to have a crisis of faith. There is also an episode where Edith attends the funeral of her lesbian cousin, who she didn’t know was a lesbian. Edith has a talk with her cousin’s partner, who explains how they had to live in secret because they could have lost their jobs as school teachers. It’s a perfect example of how LGBTQ people still had to live in fear, even after Stonewall. The show also dealt with things like the Vietnam War and other social justice issues of the time, mainly through arguments between Archie Bunker and his son-in-law Mike Stivic, who he lovingly and antagonistically called “Meathead” or referred to his Polish background.
The show had many spin-offs over the years. One of my favorites was The Jeffersons. If you don’t know the show, you likely know the theme song, “Movin’ on Up”. The Jeffersons was one of the first Black sitcoms that showed an upper middle class Black family. It paved the way for shows like The Cosby Show and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. According to the Wikipedia page, it’s the second longest running Black sitcom, running for 11 seasons. George and Louise (Weezy) Jefferson moved from their neighborhood in Queens to a Manhattan high-rise on the Upper East Side, with a cast of wacky neighbors, including Mr. Bentley who worked at the United Nations and Tom and Helen Willis, who were TV’s first interracial couple.
As a kid, the Willises were a big deal for me. I had never seen interracial couples on TV before. I obviously knew that interracial relationships were a thing, both of my mom’s brothers were in relationships with white women. But to see a Black woman married to a white man showed me that it was a life that was possible. They even had kids, which is awesome and also hilariously inaccurate. Their daughter Jenny, who was married to Lionel Jefferson, was portrayed by a Black actress, while their son Allan was played by a white actor. Obviously, this isn’t how mixed race kids work AT ALL, but I have to assume it’s because so much of the audience still didn’t even know what a mixed race kid looked like. When the Willises premiered on The Jeffersons in 1975, interracial marriage had only been legalized eight years prior in 1967. Their relationship is often the butt of a joke by George, but no one is truly offended by it, nor do they truly invalidate it.
I can’t even begin to imagine how it must have felt to that first generation of interracial couples who could be legally and openly married without fear of legal ramifications. For them to then see it on TV? That must have been incredibly validating.
My other favorite Lear show from that era is without a doubt, Maude, though I didn’t actually see it until last year. Before Bea Arthur was known as Dorothy Zbornak, she was Maude Finlay, Edith Bunker’s ultra liberal, second wave feminist cousin. Maude is most famous for the episode where the character gets pregnant in her 40s and decides to have an abortion, which aired two months before Roe v. Wade was signed into law. I’m very glad that we don’t live in a world where they could resurrect Maude and put her in this current political climate like they did with Murphy Brown or Frasier Crane. What made her so good was that she was a product of her time, even though she would actually fit very well into current times. The first two seasons are available for streaming, and Beth and I flew through them. Everytime Maude did something social justice oriented, like the episode where she gets herself arrested for marijuana possession, I would turn to Beth and go, “I feel like I know this brand of white woman.”
Maude had a spinoff of its own, Good Times. Florida Evans was the Findlays maid in the first couple of seasons, and her sparring with Maude is truly a lesson in comedy, especially when you think of the power dynamics between the two characters. Good Times completely changes the family’s background from middle class to poverty stricken and moves them from New York to a housing project in inner city Chicago. It dealt with topical issues as well, including child abuse, which introduced Janet Jackson’s character Penny. Good Times is best known for the buffoonish character J.J. Evans and his catchphrase “DY-NO-MITE!” I didn’t like this show as much, but there were redeeming moments.
I didn’t watch One Day at a Time reruns, but my mom did and told me about it. It was one of the shows that featured a divorced mother of teenage daughters. Until that time, single mothers were usually widows, as if death made their lack of partner more palatable. The premise of the show reflects the changing attitude around divorce, and shows that women are capable of caring for families on their own.
In 2017, Lear executive produced a reboot of One Day at a Time, developed for Netflix. This time, it featured a Cuban-American family, the Alvarezes. I inhaled this reboot in a weekend, and it became a favorite in my house. I wrote about the first season for Scary Mommy, so you can read my whole review. But the coolest and best thing about the reboot is that the daughter, Elena, was a lesbian! Her coming out is the dominant narrative of the show’s first season, and subsequent seasons see her in a relationship with Syd, who is nonbinary. The reboot followed its predecessors in that it covered topics like immigration (in the first season, Elena has a friend who’s parents are deported), PTSD, alcoholism and veteran’s rights. Beth got to interview the show’s creators and the actress who played Elena for Feeling Seen, which was so cool. It’s such an important show, and so excellently carried on Lear’s legacy.
All of these shows have left an indelible mark on me as a TV viewer and a person who makes art. What Lear did was show the messy parts of the human experience to millions of people every week. Archie Bunker had no problem calling people a “fag.” George Jefferson didn’t hesitate to call his friend and neighbor Tom a “honky.” It wasn’t used for shock value, it was simply the way people spoke back then. He was simply using the TV screen as a mirror to reflect all the complicated parts of people back at them. Bigots may not have realized that Archie was there to make them look bad because they were too busy pointing to the screen saying, “See? This guy gets it.” Though they tuned in to see the bigot, they also saw a lesbian, a gay man, and a trans woman too.
Audiences realized that there was a spectrum to the Black experience, that they could find themselves anywhere between the Jeffersons and the Evanses. They could see that divorce didn’t end Ann Romano’s life. It gave the big bad feminists a chance to be funny. But more importantly, it gave them all a chance to be human.
I feel lucky to be a student of the Norman Lear style of television making. Even though it’s not a medium I work in, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t had an impact on how I write criticisms or characters in my own stories. Those shows taught me to use my work as a mirror and a door — to let the people who need to see themselves be seen, and to also give people who don’t share those experiences a viewpoint they never considered.
Thank you for paving the way Mr. Lear. May your memory be a blessing.