[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful you're here. On today's show, we have a live in-studio performance from the band Lawrence. They just ended a four-month tour in Brooklyn over the weekend. We'll also speak with strategist, editor-in-chief Maxine Builder about how to find some great gifts this holiday season, and yes, if you're struggling to come up with ideas, you can call in. Pitchfork's Puja Patel joins us to talk about that magazine's best songs of the year. That's the plan, so let's get this started with remembering Norman Lear who died last Tuesday at the age of 101.

[MUSIC - Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine: Movin' On Up]

Alison Stewart: Over the end of that theme song from the sitcom, The Jefferson, appears the graphic developed by Norman Lear. It was Lear's longest-running show in a list of programs that changed television, including Maude, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, Twice, Good Times, 227, The Facts of Life, Silver Spoons, Who's The Boss?, and of course, a family from Queens with liberal kids and conservative parents, All In The Family starring Jean Stapleton as the dim but darling Edith and Carroll O'Connor as the irascible Archie Bunker.

Archie Bunker: If I got a ride them subways another two years, you're going to have to check me into a rubber room.

Edith Bunker: Oh, ain't that funny. Where is this--

Archie Bunker: I was coming home. I'm talking to you. [laughter] I'm coming home tonight and it's sardine time again. Here is a guy pressed up against me so close his buttons are making permanent dents in my flesh, see. [laughter] There we are, we're riding nose to nose and he starts talking to his daughter.

Edith Bunker: What's the matter with that?

Archie Bunker: She wasn't there. [laughter] Then on top of that, the bum behind me had beans for lunch.

[laughter]

Edith Bunker: How did you know that?

[laughter]

Archie Bunker: I could tell by the way he smiled.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: In addition to the laughs, Lear leaves behind a legacy of making TV that pushed boundaries, choosing comedy and commentary. His shows touched on racism, sexism, gay rights, abortion, rape, and other subjects not usually nestled in 22 minutes of network television. Born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1922, Lear dropped out of Emerson College to join the military in 1942. After being discharged from the Army, he began his television career writing a few episodes for Four Star Revue variety show in 1950. Lear quickly went on to work on other projects, including ones for the big screen. In a statement, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel said he created families that mirrored ours.

President Joe Biden stated, "Lear made generations of Americans care and we are grateful." Today, writer Alan Sepinwall joins us to discuss Norman Lear's legacy. He is Rolling Stone's chief TV critic and also the author of Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion, The Sopranos Sessions, and most recently, Welcome to the O.C.: The Oral History, which is out now. Hi, Alan. Welcome back to All Of It.

Alan Sepinwall: Alison, thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we'd like to hear from you. What was your favorite Norman Lear sitcom? Was it All In The Family, Sanford and Son, Good Times? Is there a particular moment in one of his shows that you think of often? How did you feel about the way these sitcoms portrayed family dynamics? Maybe you knew or even worked with Norman Lear? Let's hear from you too. You can call us and join us on air at 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can also text to us at that number or reach out on social media @allofitwnyc. Okay, Alan, before you became a professional television writer and critic, what is your first memory of a Norman Lear show?

Alan Sepinwall: I remember watching All in the Family in syndication. I was born in the early seasons of the show, so I didn't watch it in first run, but it was just on all the time. I watched it when I was little. I remember Archie's toilet flushing, which I believe was also a TV first. There's a conversation that's always stuck with me where Archie is arguing with a son-in-law, Mike, about the order in which you put on your socks and shoes, where one of them puts on one sock and one shoe, and then the other sock and the other shoe.

It's illustrating the fact that even on that micro level, they can just never come to an agreement on everything. Even in those days, I could tell, okay, they were talking about things I don't quite understand, but this feels very grown up to me in a way that, say, The Brady Bunch did not.

Alison Stewart: As a writer and a critic, what was it about what Norman Lear did that was unusual?

Alan Sepinwall: Everything. We could start off with the fact that Archie and Mike and the other characters on the show would talk about politics, talk about the issues of the day, as you said, in a way that TV did not really do prior to that. Certainly, sitcoms did not do. A couple of years before All In The Family came on, CBS was known for these genial rural sitcoms like Petticoat Junction and Mayberry R.F.D and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. and all of that. Then suddenly, here is the show about this reactionary bigot arguing about Nixon and crime and race and everything else with his liberal son-in-law. That just wasn't done.

The fact that Archie was so abrasive in so many ways and so offensive in so many ways was also not done. Ultimately TV before that was considered a place for comfort. Norman Lear believed that if a character was written well enough and played well enough by Carroll O'Connor, audiences would come anyway and he was right. It became the number-one show on television.

Alison Stewart: What are some of the defining characteristics of his work?

Alan Sepinwall: Obviously, you have to have these indelible characters. You have to have characters that are living in the present day in some way or others. Jefferson, as you mentioned, that was his longest-running show. That's a great show. That was a show that was less vocally political than a lot of the other ones he did, but it's mere existence was political that you had this portrait of Black excellence with this wealthy couple moving from Queens to the Upper East Side of Manhattan that their best friends were an interracial couple. In every way, it had to feel modern. These shows were funny. It was never speechifying, they were never lecturing.

Maude is a very liberal, progressive character, and yet the show made fun of her all the time for being a hypocrite for trying to be friends with her maid played by Esther Rolle, who eventually went on to Good Times. It was like it's got to be smart, it's got to be topical, but ultimately it has to be funny or people are not going to want to watch this.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Alan Sepinwall. He is Rolling Stone's chief TV critic. We are talking about the legacy of Norman Lear. If you would like to join this conversation, you can call in at 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or you can text us at that number as well. Was there a particular show that you liked to watch that was a Norman Lear show? Is there a particular episode that really sticks with you? 212-433-9692. Where did Norman Lear find inspiration for his characters and his sitcoms?

Alan Sepinwall: All In The Family was technically based on a British show, but if I remember right, he never actually watched it. He just knew what the premise was. More importantly, he had a relationship with his own father, where basically he was Mike and his father was Archie. That inspired a lot of that. He was inspired by his actors. Bea Arthur came onto a few episodes of All In The Family. He loved what she was doing. Suddenly Maude got her own show. He saw Sherman Hemsley on Broadway.

Loved him so much that he waited literally years to introduce George Jefferson on The Jeffersons because he knew this is the man I want to play him and I want to tailor him to Sherman Hemsley. He would do that a lot of the time. He would see what an actor was doing and really lean into that whenever he could.

Alison Stewart: Norman Lear worked well into his '90s. He was very involved with all kinds of different projects. I had the good fortune to interview him a few years back for an Atlantic magazine, a live event that was about the new old age and how people think about aging differently now. I want to play a little clip from that interview.

Norman Lear: Old is more cultural for me, a cultural word than it is a personal word. The way the culture works, if you're old, you wake up to be older. I wake up with things on my mind and things I need to do and I'm excited about. I don't wake up to be old.

Alison Stewart: I have to tell you, he was on it through that entire interview. He was flirty, he was hilarious, he took questions from the audience. When you think about Norman Lear's reputation and his longevity, what do you attribute it to him having a pretty good reputation for a tough business?

Alan Sepinwall: He was passionate. Obviously, he spent a lot of time. His heyday was really 1970 to 1980. He did work after that, but that was his primary period, but he was so active in the charity. He set up people for the american way. He raised money for causes. He was doing all of these things, and I was on the set of the One Day at a Time remake that he did for Netflix with some younger producers, and even though he was too old to be the day-to-day guy at that point, he was there at the tapings, I heard him giving notes. They were very on-point notes. He would watch them do a take and say, "No, no, no, have her say this instead."

This was a man in his late 90s at this point doing that and giving smarter and wiser advice than you would get from a man half that age. He just had that energy. He was fortunate enough to have his faculties to be as sharp as he was for as long as he was.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. David calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, David. Thanks for calling All Of It.

David: Hi, thanks for taking the call. Yes, there is this Instagram video that I saw about a year ago. I was a big fan of All in the Family, but this particular video had Archie coworker, who was Jewish, died, and Archie was describing going to the thing, and embedded within this little monologue was all of this anti-semitism, basically, but with a kind of also mixed with compassion because he liked his friend. His friend was very funny. "When he laughed, when he talked to you, you would laugh, and they were doing this." It was just the nuance of the combination of this guy who today, you would say, "Oh, he's a racist or anti-Semitic," but he also loved his friend.

His ability, Norman Lear, to mix with humor and flawed prejudice a human being who also cared about another human being and be watched by 40 million people, it was like, we need that now.

Alison Stewart: David, thank you for calling in. Let's talk to Michelle calling in from Scotch Plains, New Jersey. Hi, Michelle.

Michelle: Hi, there. Thanks for taking my call. Can you hear me?

Alison Stewart: Yes, you're on the air. Go for it.

Michelle: Okay, wonderful. Thank you. I was about 16, maybe 17, and my family was a huge All in the Family, Jeffersons, Maude. We just loved them all. We watched them together, but one of the ones I remember that struck me and still, and I'm 52 years old now, struck me so deeply was the episode where Edith is almost sexually assaulted in her home.

First of all, as a teenager, I was just shocked because this comedic show or this show that talked a lot about politics, now, they took something that was going on maybe within the home break ins and things like that and it affected Edith, the nicest, most naive, beautiful character in the show, and then it made everyone emotionally be different. Archie, Edith, the people who found out, it was just such an intensely emotional scene episode. I have not forgotten it in 40 years.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for calling in. It's interesting, there's a lot of pro-All in the Family, there's some folks who are saying, who are texting in that calling his son meathead, kids mimicked that. That some of the stuff, he used to call Edith dingbat and things that just would completely not fly today. Even back then, one of the networks that was supposed to air it got cold feet. Could you tell that part of the story?

Alan Sepinwall: Yes. It was developed at ABC. They shot a couple of different pilots. I believe one was called Justice For All because he was called Archie Justice back then, and then another was called Those Were the Days. Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton were, I think, in both of those, but there were different kids each time, and ultimately, ABC was worried like people are going to protest this. People don't want to see this. Norman Lear got lucky that CBS was ager to move away from that rural image and try to be more cutting edge, and they felt that would be more appealing to advertisers, and that worked. To what you were saying before, what people are texting in.

The fascinating and at times unsettling part of the show is that they did surveys where, I think, maybe up to a third of the people who watched the show thought that Archie was the hero and the show was making fun of Mike because they felt like, "Oh, here's a man who is speaking for us," and so even back then 50 years ago, pop culture could be the sort of Rorschach test like that.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a clip. This is from Season 2, Episode 15. It was titled Edith's Problem. In this scene, Edith and her daughter, Gloria, are having a conversation about menopause. This is from All in the Family.

Gloria: Really? Ma, it says in the article it can start anytime after 40.

Edith: And when it does, it can turn you into an old woman.

Gloria: Oh, no, Ma, that doesn't happen nowadays. It's a natural, beautiful time of life.

Edith: Beautiful? Well, it don't feel very beautiful. I feel like I'm jumping in and out of a hot bath and somebody's twisting a rubber band around my head.

Gloria: Oh, Ma, and there's nothing to worry about. Look, it says right here. "Nowadays, with simple hormone treatment, there are no unpleasant manifestations."

Edith: Well, my aunt Elizabeth went through this and she didn't get manifestation, she got a mustache.

[laughter]

Gloria: Here, you better read this article. It's written by a very important doctor and he knows everything about it.

Edith: He don't know your father. [laughter] When Archie hears about this, he ain't going to love me no more.

Gloria: Oh, Ma, of course, he will.

Edith: Oh, I'm sorry. Imagine you having to tell me what's wrong. When I was a young girl, I didn't know what every young girl should know. Now I'm going to be

an old lady and I don't know what every old lady should know.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Alan, not just on All in the Family, but what were some of the issues that Norman Lear and his programming brought to American television audiences that was taboo in many households?

Alan Sepinwall: On Good Times, they dealt with institutionalized racism. There's a great episode where the youngest son of the family, Michael, has to take an aptitude test in school, and he realizes that the questions are weighted in such a way that they're much more comprehensible to a well-to-do white person than they are to a Black kid living in a housing project. That show did stories about child abuse. Maude, several months before the Roe v. Wade ruling became the law of the land at the time, Maude got an abortion, which even now, 50 years later, feels kind of shocking.

You still would have for decades after characters on TV, they would get pregnant, they would not necessarily want to keep the pregnancy, and they would have a very conveniently timed miscarriage. No, Maude went to a doctor and she got an abortion, and Norman Lear was allowed to do this back then. There was a lot of stuff. The Jeffersons obviously dealt with prejudice as well. It covered a very wide gamut.

Alison Stewart: We are talking about the legacy of Norman Lear with you listeners, as well as with Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone's chief TV critic. After the break, we'll get into The Jeffersons, Good Times, maybe even a little Square Pegs, and a little bit of controversy that you may have read about online regarding a producer named Eric Monte. We'll talk about all of it after the break.

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Alan Sepinwall. We are talking about the legacy of Norman Lear. Alan Sepinwall is Rolling Stone's chief TV critic. We're talking about his legacy. What's so interesting, we've gotten a couple of people asking us to comment on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was surreal. That's one of the words that someone used to describe the show, and it tends to get left out a little bit. Do you have any thoughts on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman before we go back to the traditional sitcoms.

Alan Sepinwall: Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was a soap opera parody. It ran nightly for a couple of seasons. There's over, I believe, 300 episodes of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman with Louise Lasser as a midwestern housewife who's just struggling with her life. It's one of those things where if you have to produce that much TV in that amount of time, it's going to get weird. At times it's just going to turn into a straight-up soap opera. It becomes the thing you're parodying it. It also had a couple of spinoffs, a pair of talk shows, both hosted by Martin Mull, called Fernwood Tonight, and then America 2-Night.

Those shows have generally not been in syndication as much as All in the Family or The Jeffersons or some of the others, and so you really have to have been watching TV at the time in the late '70s to have any memory of them at all. Even I've only seen a handful of episodes of each.

Alison Stewart: I got a text that says, "When I saw The Jeffersons in its original run, I liked that it showed a Black family who 'made it', but when I saw it's syndication, I wondered whether it was really a critique of the American dream. The other side of the coin was Good Times, and I say other side of the coin because The Jeffersons was about a family that made it the Upper East Side, they had money. Then we had the family in Good Times, which they lived in subsidized housing, and they were on hard times, but they were good times." What was the original intent of Good Times? Let's start there.

Alan Sepinwall: The original intent of Good Times was to do kitchen sink realism comedy about this blue-collar couple, Florence and James, spinning off the character that Esther Rolle had been playing on Maude and that John Amos had played briefly. Although I think they changed his name in between the two. There were never any references to Maude on there, but it was focusing on them and trying to raise their family in this fictionalized version of Cabrini-Green.

At a certain point, the audience really started gravitating towards their teenage son, JJ, played by Jimmy Walker, who had this catchphrase, dynamite, and Jimmy Walker was doing this very exaggerated performance that I think John Amos and Esther Rolle did not love, and they certainly didn't love that they were losing screen time to it. There was a lot of controversy in the Black community about, "Wait a minute, the show started out as this one thing, and now it's celebrating this negative stereotypical character," but the show became more popular as it leaned more into him.

Eventually, Amos, and then Rolle left the show as a result, but even after that, they would still do certain more serious storylines. That's around the time when they introduced young Janet Jackson as Penny, whose mother, she lives down the hall from them, and her mother is burning her with an iron because she's abusive.

Alison Stewart: We're going to listen to a clip from Good Times. This is from Season 2, Episode 5. It's titled The Man I Most Admire. In this scene, Michael shares his admiration for his mom, Florida. Let's take a listen.

Michael: The man I most admire is right here in this family.

JJ: I accept the honor with all humility.

[laughter]

Michael: The man I most admire is a person. She makes clothes for my sister, since my father out on job hunting with a smile, cooks for her friend. The person I most admire is my mother.

Speaker 1: Now you're talking, Michael. You couldn't have made a better choice.

Michael: There are.

Florida: Oh, children, I'm flattered, but I'm not famous.

Michael: Mama, a person doesn't have to be famous to be admired. The things you do around here are great. You keep our family together.

JJ: Don't forget your biggest accomplishment, me.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: That's of course, JJ Walker. That goes to the point you were making, he became enormously popular. Eric from Brooklyn has been holding, and I asked him to hold because I did want to get to this issue. Some people may have heard this a little bit on NPR this weekend. Eric Deggans from NPR talked about this a little bit on Weekend Edition. Eric, go for it.

Eric Deggans: Hey, how are you doing? I just wanted to include the producer-writer Eric Monte on Good Times and The Jeffersons and on the series that he created called What's Happening. Eric Monte was the co-creator of Good Times along with Mike Evans who played the character of Lionel Jefferson. They introduced these characters, but Eric Monte was ceremoniously ostracized from the producing writing community of Hollywood once there was pushback on certain ideas that he wanted for Good Times versus the father, John Amos, remained there as far as having a father figure for the sons and daughters of the Evans family. There was pushback on that.

There was monies and royalties not given to Eric Monte for the creation of these characters. As you know in Hollywood, if you create something, if you write something, you are given royalties even if you're not doing anything for every single time that a show airs that you had at hand in creating. Eric Monte was not properly given the financial support that he needed nor did he receive the credit. This is the person who actually wrote the movie Cooley High. Again he created the actual show What's Happening, and with the show What's Happening, he was not invited to be a part of that show as a producer because they said, "You don't have any producing experience."

In turn, they got three other producers, they gave them credit, and he was not, again, given the royalties for creating this show. As a matter of fact, they saw that he had a lawsuit that was pending against Norman Lear and he was blackballed throughout the industry and he never produced a series again.

Alison Stewart: I want to dive in, and I do want to point out, though, that he did successfully sue ABC and CBS for using his ideas for Good Times, The Jeffersons, and What's Happening without credit, and he was awarded a million dollars but over time, he said that it did cost him his career. Eric, I thank you so much for bringing that up. I got a note on Instagram that says, "As a white kid growing up in a tiny, all-white Midwestern town in the '70s, The Jeffersons was all I knew about Black people. It was a favorite show of mine, so I'm glad I got to see a representation of Black Americans." Something else that happened on The Jeffersons which was unusual, was an interracial couple. Alan.

Alan Sepinwall: I'm sorry, yes.

Alison Stewart: Sorry, it wasn't really a question. I was just saying that out loud. [chuckles] Go for it.

Alan Sepinwall: No, you had occasionally seen interracial couples before, but to have a regular group pair of characters on the show, interracial and with two biracial children, this was a huge deal and had never really been done before. Through that, you could also explore George's, I would say, ambivalent attitudes towards this. Again, a lot of things Norman did were groundbreaking, but also to get to the Eric Monte point, he did great things in terms of performers of color in front of the camera, less so behind the camera.

If you look at a lot of the writing staffs, a lot of the directors, crew members, et cetera, you will not find nearly as many nonwhite personnel there. He did not always walk the walk even as he was talking the talk.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Nia on Line 3 calling in from Manhattan. Hi, Nia, thanks for calling All Of It.

Nia: Hi. I am really delighted to be able to share my Norman Lear story. I was living in New York in my mid-20s. I am now still living in New York in my mid-70s. I wrote a letter to Norman expressing my interest in working in television and I had a story idea for one of his programs. He called me back, he flew me out to Los Angeles first class. I remember very well it was one of those huge jumbo jets that had the spiral staircase. They don't exist anymore. He was so kind, and also he assigned me to work on a program, and the program was Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

I got to meet him and his staff, everybody was lovely. I learned a lot. It's my story and I'm sure he did wonderful nice things to people throughout his life. I'm just absolutely grateful for my experience with him.

Alison Stewart: Nia, thank you for calling in. Alan, before we wrap, I feel like my fellow Gen-Xers, we need to at least mention Square Pegs. A sitcom about teenage outsiders in the early 1980s, which starred Sarah Jessica Parker as Patty, a sweet, nerdy girl with her best friend, braces-wearing Lauren, as they attempt to survive high school. Great theme song too.

Alan Sepinwall: A great theme song.

Patty: Listen, I've got this whole high school thing psyched out. It all breaks down into cliques.

Lauren: Cliques?

Patty: Yes, you know, cliques. Little in groups of different kids. All we have to do is click with the right clique and we can finally have a social life that's worthy of us.

Lauren: No way. Not even with cleavage.

Patty: I told you, this year we're going to be popular.

Lauren: Yes?

Patty: Yes, even if it kills us.

[MUSIC-The Waitresses: Square Pegs]

Alison Stewart: I watched an episode of it. It felt so ahead of its time, Alan. It seems like, if it came out today, it would have been a bigger hit.

Alan Sepinwall: Oh my God, yes. There's a character on the show, Johnny Slash, who was always talking about new wave and trying to explain the difference between new wave and punk. He would always say, "It's a totally different head, totally," and that has stuck with me for 40 years now.

Alison Stewart: The One Day at a Time adaptation from 2017, it was a family. Actually, somebody actually texted us about seeing a divorced family on TV and it really meant a lot to them as a kid being of a divorced family. How was the 2017 reboot different and what was Lear's involvement?

Alan Sepinwall: Norman developed it, although it was largely run by Gloria Calderón Kellett and Mike Royce. Norman's ideas were, one, he wanted the single mother at the head of the family to be a military veteran. He was really concerned at the time about what was happening at the VA. Various things that eventually got reported in public about just the difficulty veterans were having in getting all the services to which they were entitled. Also, they were Cuban American and the great Rita Moreno played the matriarch of the family who was living with them.

Every episode is dealing with different hot-button issues regarding race, regarding sexuality, regarding PTSD, regarding all of these things. I really love the original show with Bonnie Franklin, but the remake I felt was really special in the way, in that best kind of Norman Lear way where it was able to weave in the comedy along with much, much more serious and very relevant topics.

Alison Stewart: We've been discussing the legacy of Norman Lear with you callers and with Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone's chief TV critic. Alan, thank you so much for being with us.

Alan Sepinwall: It's always my pleasure.

Alison Stewart: Let's go out on the theme song to One Day at a Time, sung by Gloria Estefan.

[MUSIC - Gloria Estefan: One Day at a Time]

 

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