Word: lear
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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With eight shows on the air, watched by an estimated 120 million Americans weekly, Lear is the most successful entrepreneur in the history of the medium. However, he considers himself "a writer, first and foremost," and is the most trenchant, uninhibited and influential of the TV breed. Not since Disney has a single showman invaded the screen and the national imagination with such a collection of memorable characters. Indeed, perhaps no American entertainer has created so raucous or raunchy a crew as Archie and Edith, Maude and Walter, J.J., the Jeffersons, Sanford and son-and this season's most...
Stratified Sitcoms. One reason for his long reign has been Lear's almost teleological ability to have at least one new talk-provoking show on the air before his last hit has settled into acceptance. In January 1972, just a year after All in the Family made its debut, Lear produced Sanford and Son, his first black sitcom, and watched it soar into the top ten rated shows. It was followed that September by Maude, a spin-off from Family, whose mercurial, politically liberal protagonist taught a nation's housewives the imprecation: "God'll getcha for this...
Last January came Lear's most tantalizing show, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman-MHII, as it is known in the trade-the parody soap opera. Because the networks, according to Lear, were afraid of the freaky show, MH II is syndicated to almost 100 stations. It often runs late in the evening and is thereby changing the viewing habits of millions of Americans. (In Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, where it appears at 11 p.m., it regularly beats out one or two news shows.) Its success, confounding the early critics (including TIME), fills Lear with unholy...
...tragicomedy, Lear's real forte, in which one man's yuk can be another's yecch. In one recent episode, he decided to hold a funeral service in Mary's kitchen for a sports coach who had drowned in a bowl of chicken soup. "I just thought it was off-the-wall funny," says Lear. "When I told my wife Frances about the idea, she said, 'Norman, this time you've gone too far-even for you.' But it worked. It was funny." So funny that the New York Times's critic...
Stifled Wife. Lear's casting is always impeccable, but what makes the shows run-and run and run-is close-to-the-bone conflict that is stolen shamelessly from his own life. "I've always used material right out of my own life," he boasts. "Nowadays, if we're stuck in a scene, I just reach into my gut and extract something." Archie is based on Lear's Russian-Jewish father Herman, who really did tell his wife to "stifle." When Mary Hartman went to a psychiatrist, says the writer, "she told the same story...