by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After The Contenders
PBS showed a couple of other documentaries, one an American Masters presentation on TV writer and producer Norman Lear
which was an interesting program that could have been a whole lot better if
directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady had trusted their material more. They
had the advantage in that Lear is still alive (at age 92!), still in full
possession of his faculties and gave them full cooperation. Alas, they saddled
their show with a bizarre set of framing sequences showing Lear getting ready
to achieve a lifetime achievement award from somebody or other (one of those
the late Billy Wilder once called the “quick before he croaks awards”) from
which they cut back and forth to the actual story: Lear, a contemporary and
friend of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner (both of whom appear here as interviewees),
served a similar apprenticeship as a TV writer — though he wasn’t involved in
the ground-breaking Sid Caesar Your Show of Shows that launched the careers of Reiner, Brooks, Woody
Allen, Larry Gelbart and Neil Simon. Lear got his start on the Colgate
Comedy Hour when its stars were Dean Martin
and Jerry Lewis (I hadn’t realized that Martin and Lewis were on this show before Abbott and Costello were!) and then worked on TV
shows hosted by Martha Raye, Tennessee Ernie Ford (the entire montage of his 1950’s
and early-1960’s TV work was scored with Ford’s hit record of “Sixteen Tons”
playing in the background), George Gobel, Bobby Darin, Andy Williams, Henry
Fonda and Danny Kaye (though the last four were only specials, not series).
He
also produced a TV show called The Deputy which was unmentioned on this tribute, though according to the
imdb.com summary it was a Western that prefigured the social concerns of Lear’s
later comedies: “The Deputy is
Clay McCord, a storekeeper in 1880’s Silver City, Arizona Territories, who is
an expert shot, but refuses to use his gun because he believes they are the
major cause of frontier violence. However, he is persuaded many times to be The
Deputy to help keep order when the Chief Marshal Simon Fry is out of town.” Lear
rose through the ranks of Hollywood and wrote scripts for Frank Sinatra’s
vehicle Come Blow Your Horn and
the mordant (though annoyingly sexist) satire Divorce American Style, but his career changed when he saw a British TV
sitcom called ’Til Death Do Us Part,
written, produced by and starring Johnny Speight in the role of a bigoted
proletarian whose layabout son-in-law moves in with them and sparks endless
arguments. Lear bought the U.S. rights to this show and wrote a pilot for it
called Those Were the Days which
ABC turned down; later, after further tweaking — and one important story
change; instead of an aimlessly drifting guy with no job or prospects for one,
the son-in-law character became a college student, thereby giving him a reason
for not working that U.S. audiences would find acceptable — he shot another
version, called it All in the Family,
and sold it to CBS. The network put it on rather gingerly as a mid-season
replacement for something or other and it became an instant sensation, though
it also sparked a public debate as to whether putting on a loudmouthed bigot
like Archie Bunker (as played definitively by Carroll O’Connor, who shared his
character’s origins as a New York Irish-American but not his politics — O’Connor was a liberal and I can
still remember the galvanic shock a lot of people went through when he appeared
in 1972 in a commercial for George McGovern for President) was encouraging
bigotry or fighting it by holding it up to ridicule. The latter was obviously
Lear’s intent, though it must have disheartened him when a lot of the mail the
show received was from people who agreed with Archie Bunker and were glad one
of the “liberal” TV networks had finally put someone like them on the air.
I remember watching the show at the time
and generally loving it (and having something of a crush on Rob Reiner, Carl’s
son, who played the “meathead” son-in-law and at the time was a big man but not
as enormous as he later became — not that different, come to think of it, from
my mom’s crush on Orson Welles, whom she didn’t see on screen between The
Lady from Shanghai and Touch of
Evil, by which time he’d become bloated —
even more than he was for real because Welles famously wore body padding for
his Touch of Evil role — and my
mom remembered leaving the theatre where Touch of Evil was playing and wondering, “What happened to him?”), though one night I was at my father’s
when it was about to come on and my half-sister said, in a surprisingly prissy
tone of voice for her age (about 10), “Oh, we don’t watch that show. They shout
at each other.” Lear had a string of hits after All in the Family — Good Times (which I hadn’t realized he made before The Jeffersons — indeed, The Jeffersons was a response to the criticism he’d got from a lot
of Black people, including Good Times cast members Esther Rolle and John Amos, that he was just feeding the
stereotype that all
African-Americans were ghetto dwellers, and he decided to answer that by
putting on a show about affluent Blacks who had made it in business and lived
in “a dee-luxe apartment in the sky”), Sanford and Son (another British TV import whose leads Lear changed
from white to Black for the U.S. version), the ferociously brilliant Maude (inevitably this show showcases the famous episode
in which Maude gets pregnant at 62 and decides to have an abortion) with Bea
Arthur’s performance matching O’Connor’s All in the Family work for sheer rightness for the part, and a wide
variety of shows including One Day at a Time (not mentioned here but ground-breaking in its own
way as the first TV series about a divorcée), the soap-opera spoof Mary
Hartman, Mary Hartman (among other things,
the first series to depict an openly Gay character as a “regular”) and its
spinoff Fernwood Tonight, and
mini-series like a.k.a. Pablo, Sunday Dinner (a show in which Lear wanted to explore religion and
how it figured into the lives of 1990’s Americans) and 704 Hauser (famously the address of the Bunkers in All
in the Family).
Then, at the end of the
1970’s, Lear abruptly left Hollywood, turned over the reins of his hit shows to
Alan Horn (now head of production at Disney) and focused on the activist group
People for the American Way, which he started as a direct challenge to Jerry
Falwell’s Moral Majority and the others in the so-called “Christian Right” who
had emerged as a major political force in the late 1970’s and were basically
preaching that unless you were a Right-wing anti-choice anti-Queer Republican
you couldn’t possibly be a real Christian. Though Lear has done TV work since then
(his imdb.com page lists subsequent credits even though this documentary
doesn’t mention them), he’s mostly lived in semiretirement, including writing
an autobiography called Even This I Get to Experience and starting a late-in-life family
with a second wife and a new set of kids (his first wife, Frances, left him in
the late 1970’s because she could no longer stand his workaholism and didn’t
want to keep living in L.A.). Lear’s story is a fascinating one, and his
success occurred at an historically interesting juncture in American mass
entertainment, before the proliferation of cable channels, the Internet and
social media, when there were still “water-cooler” shows huge audiences watched
one night and talked about the next day — and Lear’s mission was to make shows
that would entertain people but also get them thinking about the big social
issues of the day and listen to other points of view than their own with the
fig-leaf of comedy to make the medicine go down. It’s hard to imagine anything
like Lear’s career happening today, not only because the audience is so
fragmented but because the down side of so many entertainment choices is that
you can (and most people do) watch only
shows that reinforce what you already believe, not challenge it. After the Norman
Lear American Masters I watched a
third show on PBS — a Frontline
rerun from June 2015 called Growing Up Trans — which I promise I’ll be commenting on later.
