Word: lear
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...transformation on the tube? A new, iconoclastic generation of creative talents? An insurgent band of reformers from outside the wasteland's preserve? Hardly. If any individuals can be said to be the catalysts they are a pair of tanned and creased Hollywood veterans named Alan ("Bud") Yorkin and Norman Lear...
...Both are canny professionals who grew up with the medium. Lear served an apprenticeship as a comedy writer in the '50s and '60s with Martin Lewis, George Goble, Tennessee Ernie Ford and Andy Williams, among others. Yorkin staged such shows as Martin and Lewis's, Gobel's, and Dinah Shore's, later directed specials for Jack Benny and Fred Astaire. Together, as partners in a venture called Tandem Productions they revolutionized TV comedy by adapting a British TV hit into "All in the Family...
...system as a lifetime of immutable values changed around him minute by minute. He put the "lump" in "lumpenproletariat." "All in the Family," the boundary-shattering comedy about what folks used to call "the generation gap," would have been a classic regardless, because of the passion of producer Norman Lear's ideas and the strength of his writing. But the show would not have had the resonance it did, and Archie Bunker would not be one of the three or four most important characters in TV history, without Carroll O'Connor...
...room. The values he developed through the depression and a war were fraying and decaying like his upholstered TV-watching throne. (The prominence of his other throne - the upstairs toilet whose on-air flushing was so shocking three decades ago - underscored the theme of Archie as an Astoria King Lear...
...realm of buffoonery and carried him to his logical extreme; he took the omniscient, benevolent TV dad of the '50s and exploded that figure as irrevocably as a gunpowder-stuffed tobacco pipe. Sure, this was a slap in the face of conservatives, who chafed at the show's Norman Lear liberalism. But the O'Connor's genius was that he played the part well enough to discomfit ideologues on the left too. Archie Bunker proved that satire is TV's most dangerous genre, because it cannot be controlled - it requires interpretation, which is anathema to true believers...