The Life and Times of King (Norman) Lear

One of the more telling sentences in Tripp Whetsell’s excellent Norman Lear: His Life and Times is the author’s surprise upon hearing of the legendary producer’s passing. “The one thing I never anticipated was Norman’s death on December 5, 2023,” he writes. Lear was 101! “He was the Energizer Bunny,” Whetsell told The Saturday Evening Post with a laugh. “He never slowed down. He was in his 90s when he was involved with the Live with a Studio Audience specials that recreated classic episodes of All in the Family and Good Times and the 2017 reboot of One Day at a Time. It was unthinkable that he would ever die.”

Norman Lear: His Life and Times is the first comprehensive biography of one of the television’s towering cultural figures. It examines the producer’s fraught relationship with his father, who inspired some of Archie Bunker’s most memorable catchphrases on All in the Family, his career in early television, his Oscar-nominated film work, and his prolific television portfolio: the good (Maude, Sanford and Son), the bad (All That Glitters) and the brilliant but cancelled (Hot L Baltimore, Palmerstown, U.S.A.).

Whetsell could have easily called his biography King Lear, but that would have been too obvious, and Lear throughout his seven-decade career eschewed the obvious sitcom tropes or fantastical flights from reality like a talking horse, a married suburban witch, or a group of quirky island castaways. The television shows he created, including The Jeffersons and Good Times, dealt with real issues and flawed characters who were all the funnier and more human because of their flaws.

When Lear passed away in 2023, his obituaries, Whetsell writes, were less becoming of a television auteur than they were of a national hero, “which for much of the nation Norman was.” He certainly was for Whetsell, who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s watching the groundbreaking shows Lear shepherded to the small screen. Lear was, as President Joe Biden eulogized, “a transformational force in American culture, whose trailblazing shows redefined television with courage, conscience, and humor, opening our nation’s eyes and often our hearts.”

True enough, but what’s funny about that, Whetsell says, is that all Lear wanted to do was get a television show on the air. In the case of All in the Family, his best known and most honored series, which ran from 1971 to 1979, Lear was “in the right place at the right time” (see sidebar).

Says Whetsell, “CBS had orchestrated its rural purge (the cancellation of The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Hee-Haw and Mayberry R.F.D.) and was looking for something more contemporary. Norman had what they were looking for with All in the Family. But he wasn’t necessarily looking to change television. He just had a funny show that dealt with contemporary issues. He was a very smart man, and once he got his bearings, there was no stopping him. No one was going to say no to him with a Number One show, and he just kept shooting higher and higher. He was able to leverage his gravitas very cleverly.”

With great power, the saying goes, comes great responsibility, and Lear used his to advance causes he held dear. He founded the progressive advocacy group People for the American Way. In 1982, he produced an all-star television special, I Love Liberty, which featured, among others, Robin Williams performing a monologue as the American flag. “At the time, he was concerned about the rise of the political right, as represented by Reverend Jerry Falwell,” Whetsell says.

But it was the funny that first enthralled a young Whetsell, then an aspiring entertainment journalist. “They were hysterical shows,” he says, “and after a while I became aware that they were created by this one particular person. He became as famous as the shows he created.”

Lear published his autobiography in 2014. Whetsell interviewed Lear for TV Guide in 2011 to mark All in the Family’s 40^th anniversary and invited him to participate in the comedy class he taught at Emerson College, which Lear and Whetsell had both attended, along with other comedy A-listers such as Jay Leno, Dennis Leary, and Andrea Martin. He also featured Lear in his previous book, The Improv: An Oral History of the Comedy Club That Revolutionized Stand-Up. By the time Whetsell commenced his biography of Lear in 2021, Lear was too old to participate, but he had the support of Lear’s daughter.

Lear was not only the recipient of many of the arts’ most glittering prizes (the Emmy, the Peabody), he also had awards named in his honor (the Humanitas Prize Norman Lear Award). Whetsell sees a connection between Lear and Budd Friedman, founder of the Improv comedy club. Both men never deliberately set out to change the face of an art form. “It just happened that way,” Whetsell says. “You can only invent one lightbulb, but you can improve on the technology. That’s how it was with Norman, and no one shined brighter.”

The Origin of All in the Family

An excerpt from Norman Lear: His Life & Times by Tripp Whetsell

Norman learned about a TV show making waves over in England called Till Death Us Do Part. Its premise about the dysfunctional family dynamics of a working-class bigot from London’s East End constantly at odds with his socialist liberal son-in- law resonated with him. He also began to think something like it might work in the United States and set out to buy the American rights — sight unseen.

How Till Death Us Do Part first landed on Norman’s radar screen is said to have happened in several ways. By most accounts, including the one in his memoir, it originally came to his attention after he read an item about it in TV Guide during the editing debacle of The Night They Raided Minsky’s, although in some instances over the years he said he read about it in Variety.

For his part, Bud Yorkin had always maintained that he mailed Norman the videotape on something of a lark, telling the Television Academy Foundation in 1997: “I said this will blow your mind, [but] never did it dawn on me . . . that was Norman’s idea totally of trying to do it here. I just said, ‘Want to have some fun? Watch this show.’”