Word: lear
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...Fool? Good man? Yorkin and Lear soon learned what it might have felt like to be Cadmus, the legendary Greek who sowed dragon's teeth only to see them spring up from the ground as armed men fighting each other. From the dragon's teeth of Archie's vocabulary, the producers reaped a crop of ethnic spokesmen, psychologists and sociologists, all armed with studies and surveys and battling each other over whether "Family" had lampooned bigotry or glorified it. The debate seemed rather top-heavy for such light humor, but that was precisely the issue: whether "Family...
...Laura Z. Hobson, who prodded the public conscience with her 1947 novel about anti-Semitism, "Gentlemen's Agreement," complained that "you cannot be a bigot and be lovable." Lear replied that bigotry was most common and most insidious when it occurred in otherwise lovable people. Since then, Northwestern University Sociologist Charles Moskos has supported both the Bunkers and the de-Bunkers by arguing that "Family's" humor cuts two ways: "It is a cheap way for tolerant uppermiddle-class liberals to escape their own prejudices while the bigots get their views reinforced." Lear concedes that the humorous treatment of bigotry...
...Meanwhile, Yorkin and Lear's breakthrough with "Family" has prompted a host of imitators ? led by Yorkin and Lear. The best of the shows to explore the comic territory they opened up is their "Sanford and Son" (also adapted from a British original), which made its debut on NBC last January...
...Among the first through that new door for the coming season were ? once again ? Yorkin and Lear. This time they have a spin-off from "Family" called "Maude," and already it ranks as one of the fall's top prospects. Maude is Edith Bunker's cousin who lives somewhere in upstate New York. As played by the formidable (5 ft. 9 in.), husky-contral-toed Beatrice Arthur, she may do for liberal suburban matrons what Archie has done for urban hardhats...
...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...