Word: norman
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...this 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...
...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...
...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 and New York City, as the elder Lear pursued a variety...
...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...