Word: sanfords
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...excitement, and precious little for a white, middle-class audience to identify with. Just two blacks, father and son, running a junk shop in Los Angeles and playing a continual, if affectionate game of oneupmanship. Yet NBC's Sanford and Son, which premiered in January, is already one of TV's top ten shows. With so much seemingly going against it, what does Sanford have going for it? Above all, it has Redd Foxx...
Foxx, at 49 the dean of black comedians, might have been preparing all his raffish life for the role of Junkman Fred Sanford. "He's an old black dude, and he don't take no stuff," explains Foxx. "He's a con artist. He thinks up elaborate, wily tricks, and I enjoy him." Most of his tricks are directed against his son Lament (Demond Wilson) to keep him from marrying and leaving home. One girl friend, Foxx assures the boy, would end up like her mother, "King Kong in bloomers." He is constantly complaining about his nonexistent...
...Sanford & Son (NBC) is a promising situation comedy produced by Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear, the team that created All in the Family. Like Family, which was based on a long-running BBC hit called Till Death Do Us Part, the new show is also an adaptation of an English model. This time Yorkin and Lear have taken the BBC's Steptoe & Son, about the tribulations of a cockney junk dealer and his son, and Americanized it by setting it in a low-income black milieu. In the process they have come up with an inspired piece of casting...
...real theme of Sanford & Son is the generation gap. Son Lamont Sanford (Demond Wilson) struggles with his complacent parent in comic exchanges that, for all their surface harshness, are affectionately respectful. And Redd Foxx shows that the old man's bite comes from an essential warmth and humanity. Indeed, Foxx, who has written his own material for years, supplied some of his own acerbic lines. At one point when he had to refer to a black family who put on airs, he suggested using the authentic vernacular phrase "jive niggers." A less obvious Foxx contribution: the show...
...Texas, Kennedy's candidacy would revive the feud between L.B.J. and Bobby Kennedy Democrats. In South Carolina, he would drive loyal conservative Democrats into the arms of Nixon again. In North Carolina, the old-line Dems like Terry Sanford would vote for him, but east Carolina residents would follow Wallace, and people in the Piedmont would return to Nixon. In short, Teddy would be wise to sit out the next election if his success depends on the South...