Word: lear
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...flip side of Archie," is the way Lear describes Maude. "She is a Roosevelt liberal who has her feet firmly planted in the '40s." Maude knows how to arrange all the right-thinking enlightened attitudes around herself, but when she is challenged they open up like gunwales on a galleon, and she blazes away with broadsides at feckless repairmen, greedy cab drivers and her priggish right-wing neighbor...
...Maude took over the household ? especially Archie ("You can either get up off that couch and eat your breakfast or lie there and feed off your own fat ... and if you choose the latter you can probably lie there for months"). The CBS brass was watching and, in Norman Lear's words, "saw a star." A second episode ? in effect a pilot ? was concocted, in which Archie and Edith visited Maude on the eve of her daughter's wedding to a Jew: it clinched the deal for a new series...
...With "Family," "Sanford" and "Maude" going for them, Yorkin and Lear have emerged in a big way from the twilight of anonymity behind the scenes in TV. Johnny Carson was barely exaggerating when he introduced this year's Emmy, Award ceremonies as "an evening with Norman Lear." After Lear had collected one of the seven Emmys won by "Family," Carson quipped: "I understand Norman has just sold his acceptance speech as a new series...
...course it isn't just the recognition; it's the money. Yorkin and Lear's profits from their three shows this year could reach $5,000,000, not counting the take from books, records and other byproduct merchandising. With offers of further projects pouring in, their Tandem headquarters is the hottest TV production office in Hollywood. So busy are the partners nowadays that they rarely get a chance to be in the office. They run the business by remote control, communicating with each other by memo. Occasionally they rendezvous for a quick huddle in the parking lot of a studio...
...Lear, who spends most of his time at CBS as executive producer of "Family" and "Maude," is a dapper, droopy-mustached man of 50 with the comedy writer's congenital air of melancholy, like a sensitive spaniel; he tends to be the spokesman for the team. Yorkin, 46, who concentrates on being executive producer of "Sanford" at NBC, is a beefy, genial soul with a flushed face and a habit of punctuating his speech with a stabbing thumb that one senses could easily become a fist. Both men, in their divergent styles, bear down hard on their staffs to achieve...