Word: lear
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Yorkin and Lear repackaged excerpts from "Family" as an LP album and a book of Bunkerisms. Archie Bunker T shirts and beer mugs appeared. Well before Archie received a vote for the vice presidency at this summer's Democratic Convention, Columnist William S. White revealed that Washington politicos were talking about a "Bunker vote," reflecting a lower-middle-class mood of anger and resentment at a tight economy and loose permissiveness. In the White House, Richard Nixon watched an episode in which Archie's attack on "airy fairies" was blunted by the discovery that one of Archie's pals...
...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...