Word: lear
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Lear has staved off every major threat with a combination of logic, persuasion, threats to cancel a whole episode (or the whole series), and scathing contempt for the censors' "thinktank mentality," his term for the corporate and governmental attitude that underestimates "how wise-heart a great many Americans...
Doing things over is one thing; overdoing them is another. Amid all their taking of pains, Yorkin and Lear rarely forget the importance of not being earnest. Their shows are, after all, only situation comedies. The scripts, however inventive, tend more toward formula than organic form. The characterizations are still exaggerated cutouts from the fabric of real life...
...funny you might as well be on the lecture platform." As George S. Kaufman pointed out, speaking of Broadway, the savage moralizing of satire is what closes at the end of one week; sitcoms must go on week after week. Acknowledging this, Yorkin and Lear are entertainers who brandish the weapons of satire but use them sparingly. Their Bunkers and Sanfords are sheep in wolves' clothing -domesticated in every sense from a tougher breed of British precursors...
...Part, the model for Family. The fathers of Sanford and son are Steptoe and son, on the BBC series of the same name, a pair of cockney rag and bone men who batter themselves and each other relentlessly against a dead end of life. Both Yorkin and Lear adaptations follow the same recipe: take one BBC show, add the milk of human kindness and stir for 30 minutes. "One of our major concerns was not to make Sanford look too grim," says Yorkin. "The Steptoe set in England was dark and gloomy; we took pains to make ours poor...
Yorkin and Lear grew up in such a milieu-poor but not depressing-and both reach back to early days for authentic touches to bring their shows home to viewers. Lear's salesman father, though a second-generation Russian Jew, was almost as much of a source for Archie as Alf Garnett was. He used to call Norman "the laziest white kid I ever saw" and order his wife to "stifle"-both expressions that were to become Archie's. The family shifted restlessly from New Haven, Conn., where Norman was born, to nearby Hartford, then to Boston...