film / tv / politics / social media / lists celeb / pajiba love / misc / about / cbr
film / tv / politics / web / celeb

GettyImages-495496747.jpg

'Those Were the Days': Pioneering TV Producer Norman Lear Has Died at 101

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | December 6, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | December 6, 2023 |


GettyImages-495496747.jpg

We would be remiss as a pop culture site that writes extensively about television not to say a few words about the death of Norman Lear. The man lived to be 101, and while his passing is obviously sad, what an amazing life he had.

Norman Lear was one of the all-time greats, a prolific and brilliant television comedy producer who gave us All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, Sanford and Son, Good Times, One Day at a Time, and Diff’rent Strokes, among others. In a time before most, Norman Lear wrote about race and class and social politics. The Jeffersons was about an upwardly mobile Black family; Good Times was about a Black family dealing with poverty and discrimination; All in the Family was about a stubborn, white racist clinging to his old ways while his family and everyone else evolved around him. Archie Bunker was a bigot, a foil, and viewers still liked him because each episode slowly seemed to pick away at his bigotry.

Norman Lear changed television, and anyone who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s and watched a lot of TV had a steady diet of Norman Lear, and anyone who has grown up since has watched television inspired, influenced, and shaped by Norman Lear. His list of awards are too extensive to catalog: There were many Emmy nominations and wins, several lifetime achievement awards, a Kennedy Center Honor, and he even had a television award named after him. Bill Clinton also awarded him the Medal of Honor.

Lear also spent much of the ’80s and ’90s combatting Christian conservatism and censorship, founding the People for the American Way to counterbalance the Moral Majority. He was an old-school liberal and activist who helped fund Daniel Ellseberg’s defense and railed against Big Oil all the way back in the 1970s.

He slowed down in his 80s and 90s, but still wrote episodes of South Park in the early aughts, helped bring back One Day at a Time for Netflix, and he and Jimmy Kimmel recreated old episodes of All in the Family and The Jeffersons with A-list casts in 2019.

If laughter is the best medicine, it probably explains how he lived to be 101. May his memory be a blessing.