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Culture-Critiquing Sitcom Mogul Norman Lear Finally Gives Up the Ghost
It took 101 years, but television producer Norman Lear — who probably influenced American culture more than any other single figure in the 1970s — finally decided last Tuesday that it was time to die.
Lear was said to have written, created, or produced over 100 shows over his lifetime. But he was mostly known for his massively successful and monstrously subversive sitcoms of the 1970s:
All in the Family (1971-1979)
Based in part on a British sitcom called Till Death Do Us Part, which hinged on the comedic tension between a cranky Tory and his socialist son-in-law, Lear’s iteration transplanted these characters into Queens, New York, where bigoted Protestant dockworker Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) endlessly squabbled over cultural issues with his Left-leaning hippie college-student son-in-law Mike “Meathead” Stivic (Rob Reiner before he became physically obese and politically insufferable).
All in the Family suffered dismal ratings when it debuted on Tuesday nights in January of 1971, but it became an American pop-culture phenomenon in its second season after it was moved to an 8 PM time slot on Saturday nights. At least in Philadelphia, the show kicked off a stellar Saturday-night lineup on CBS from 8 to 11 PM that included, in order, All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show. As a kid, I don’t recall anyone who didn’t watch All in the Family. A friend’s dad who had to work on Saturday nights would have his wife make a cassette recording of the show just so he could listen to it when he got home on Sunday morning.
Archie Bunker was played as a buffoon and was not rendered as stupid, nor nearly as malevolent, as the murderous working-class douchebag Joe Curran as portrayed by Peter Boyle in Norman Wexler’s 1970 redneck horror movie Joe. But he was ritually outsmarted and made to look foolish by blacks, gays, women, and Jews. As the show ended its run in 1979, O’Connor continued in the same role in Archie Bunker’s Place, which ran until 1983 and gradually saw Archie become more “humanized” — i.e., humbled and put in his place by his rapidly diversifying surroundings.
Sanford and Son (1972-1977)
Based on another British sitcom called Steptoe and Son, which was about a father-son team of London junk dealers, Lear placed the two main characters in Watts and cast notoriously foul-mouthed black standup comic Redd Foxx as Fred Sanford and Demond Wilson as his son Lamont. It was the first TV sitcom to have an almost entirely black cast since The Amos ‘n’ Andy Show of the early 1950s, with the major difference being that Fred and Lamont Sanford were not portrayed as moronic, pickaninny stereotypes.
Maude (1972-1978)
In the first of Lear’s spinoff shows from All in the Family, Bea Arthur (born Bernice Frankel) portrayed Edith Bunker’s cousin Maude Findlay, a militant Left-wing feminist who represented everything that Archie Bunker resented. In a controversial two-part episode, Maude had an abortion.
Good Times (1974-1979)
This spinoff of Maude found Maude’s black maid Florida Evans (Esther Rolle, a uniquely ugly black woman) struggling along with her family against poverty and racial hatred in a Chicago housing project. It has been described as “the first television show centered on an African-American nuclear family.” The show’s title was purposely ironic, as the theme song’s lyrics described a family beset with “temporary layoffs” and “easy credit rip-offs” but, to my knowledge, it never portrayed any of the credit shysters as Jewish. Speaking of rip-offs, a black screenwriter named Eric Monte, who had written one script for All in the Family, successfully sued Norman Lear for plagiarizing his concepts for both Good Times and The Jeffersons, but only received a settlement for $1 million and a tiny percentage of residuals for Good Times, while Lear, who died with an estimated net worth of $200 million, subsequently blacklisted Monte from working in Hollywood.
The Jeffersons (1975-1985)
As Archie Bunker’s black neighbor George Jefferson, Sherman Hemsley was as joyously anti-white as Archie was anti-black, and their verbal parrying was as enjoyable to watch as the legendary 1970s encounters between Howard Cosell and Muhammad Ali. In 1975, Lear gave George Jefferson and his wife Louise (AKA “Weezie,” played by Isabel Sanford, who resembled a water buffalo with tits) their own sitcom. As a way of putting the stuck-in-his-blue-collar-until-death Archie Bunker in his place, George Jefferson used his success as the owner of a dry-cleaning business to “move on up” out of Queens to a “deluxe apartment in the sky” on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. To stick the dagger in a bit further, George’s apartment building was serviced by a white doorman (Ned Wertimer). Louise Jefferson befriended an interracial couple named Tom and Helen Willis (the white Franklin Cover and the black Roxie Roker), who had two mixed children who George referred to as “zebras.”
One Day at a Time (1975-1984)
You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.
At a time in American history when divorce and single parenting were still considered scandalous, Lear foisted this comedy on the public about a divorced rural Indiana mother (Bonnie Franklin, who sported one of those hideously unfeminine 1970s bowl haircuts for girls that was popularized by the likes of Olympic skater Dorothy Hamill), Ann Romano, and her two teenaged daughters (Valerie Bertinelli and the serially perverse Mackenzie Phillips). Ann takes her daughters to the supremely bland Midwestern city of Indianapolis to forge an all-female life for themselves away from the evil clutches of the family patriarch, only to be endlessly battered by the pig-headed douchebaggery of apartment-building superintendent Dwayne Schneider (Pat Harrington). The show was remade in 2017, only with Hispanics.
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976-1977)
Although it didn’t have nearly the impact nor the success of All in the Family — in fact, advertisers found it so unsettling that Lear was forced to push the show into first-run syndication rather than have it broadcast on network TV — it may be the most subversive of all Lear’s sitcoms. It appeared to be an urban Jew’s live-action nightmare of how much dysfunction, stupidity, and nuttiness lurk in the rural white hinterlands. Cast in the rural and stupendously non-diverse town of Fernwood, Ohio rather than a major American metropolis, it focuses on the neuroses and perversions of middle Americans such as the title character (Louise Lasser), who receives a sexually-transmitted disease from her cheating husband Tom (Greg Mullavey). In the first episode alone, a serial killer murders an entire family in Fernwood (and their chickens), while Mary’s grandfather is revealed as the “Fernwood Flasher.” Toward the end of the first season, Mary has a nervous breakdown on live TV.
* * *
Norman Milton Lear was born in Connecticut to parents of Russian-Jewish descent. He was Bar Mitzvahed in his early teens. When he was well into his 90s, a friend said that he described himself as a “total Jew.”
Lear claimed that the event that drove him into a lifetime of political advocacy disguised as entertainment occurred at age nine, when he heard several radio shows by Father Charles Coughlin, the “anti-Semitic” Catholic priest who ruled American radio in the 1930s to a degree similar to how Lear’s sitcoms ruled American television in the 1970s. At his peak in the late 1930s, Coughlin’s radio programs, which railed against Jewish influence over American affairs, drew an estimated 40 million listeners weekly, which was a third of the entire country’s population, including the countless citizens who didn’t even own radios. At the peak of All in the Family’s reign in the 1970s, an estimated 60% of American TV sets would tune in on Saturday nights to watch a show created by Jews that portrayed straight white American males as the source of all the country’s problems.
According to Lear’s Wikipedia profile:
Before All in the Family, television sitcoms in the 1950s and 1960s generally portrayed white American family life as comfortable and avoided raising issues such as racial discrimination and patriarchy.
In a 2012 interview with The New York Times, Lear said that he found American sitcoms of the 1960s to be too oppressively white and problem-free:
You looked around television in those years, and the biggest problem any family faced was ‘Mother dented the car, and how do you keep Dad from finding out’; ‘the boss is coming to dinner, and the roast’s ruined.’ The message that was sending out was that we didn’t have any problems.
According to Kevin MacDonald in The Culture of Critique, Lear was a major player amid a trend of American Jews who outwardly professed that they were attempting to cure a “sick” society, but were in fact only aiming to undermine it (I omitted copious citations from the original text to facilitate easier reading):
Jewish writers and visual artists (including E. L. Doctorow, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Frederick Wiseman, and Norman Lear) were disproportionately involved in attempts to portray American society as “sick” . . . as a means for achieving a larger purpose: the general weakening of the social order itself.
Television presents images of Jewish issues that conform to the views of mainstream Jewish organizations. Television “invariably depicts anti-Semitism as an ugly, abhorrent trait that must be fought at every turn.” It is seen as metaphysical and beyond analysis. . . . Characters who oppose cultural pluralism are portrayed as stupid and bigoted, the classic being the Archie Bunker character in Norman Lear’s All in the Family television series. Departures from racial and ethnic harmony are portrayed as entirely the result of white racism. . . .
In general, television portrays Jewish issues “with respect, relative depth, affection and good intentions, and the Jewish characters who appear in these shows have, without any doubt, been Jewish — often depicted as deeply involved in their Judaism.” For example, All in the Family (and its sequel, Archie Bunker’s Place) not only managed to portray working class Europeans as stupid and bigoted, it portrayed Jewish themes very positively. By the end of its 12-year run, even archenemy Archie Bunker had raised a Jewish child in his home, befriended a black Jew (implication: Judaism has no ethnic connotations), gone into business with a Jewish partner, enrolled as a member of a synagogue, praised his close friend at a Jewish funeral, hosted a Sabbath dinner, participated in a bat mitzvah ceremony, and joined a group to fight synagogue vandalism. These shows, produced by liberal political activist Norman Lear, thus exemplify the general trend for television to portray non-Jews as participating in Jewish ritual, and “respecting, enjoying, and learning from it. Their frequent presence and active involvement underscores the message that these things are a normal part of American life.” Jewish rituals are portrayed as “pleasant and ennobling, and they bestow strength, harmony, fulfillment, and sense of identity upon those who observe them.” . . .
After his post-sitcom 1970s heyday, Lear became an open political activist who founded People for the American Way, which was designed as a counterpoint to the Christian-Right Moral Majority.
In 1999, President Bill Clinton awarded Lear the National Medal of Arts and declared that “Norman Lear has held up a mirror to American society and changed the way we look at it.”
In the early 2000s, Lear purchased an original copy of the Declaration of Independence for $8.1 million and toured the country with it for three and a half years, saying he intended for Americans to witness their country’s “birth certificate” firsthand.
It’s all very savvy, claiming to represent the “American Way” and touring the country with the Declaration of Independence — especially from a man whose entire career consisted of defaming the very idea of “middle America” and of white males in particular. I may be wrong about this, but I was under the impression that apart from owning slave ships, Jews had very little to do with America’s founding.
And that’s the only story I’m covering this week. Norman Lear’s death means it really wasn’t a bad week at all.
31 comments
As the scripture says, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” This friendly godfather of 7o’s humor was a classic example, but, to paraphrase The Book again, “His name is Legion, for he is many.”
Reflecting on close to 70 years of TV watching, I have asked myself and others to make a list of examples where there was White vs non-White conflict and the White resister was not cast as an ignorant fool, an evil “bigot”, or both. So far I have come up empty.
I think the sad state of White consciousness is due far more to the deluge of stories and characters we have seen on our screens for so many decades than to any overt sermonizing, finger-pointing or condemnation. And smiling wolves like Lear bear much of the blame.
Minor correction: “Howard,” not “Harold Cosell.”
This rundown proves what I’ve always intuited, that Norman had no creative successes before, or after, a brief period when he started ripping off already successful British sitcoms. It was a nice racket, since back in the day no one in the US ever saw such prole fare (unlike the “quality” BBC dramas shown on Masterpiece Theater), so he seemed blindingly original. Ripping off a black man for The Jeffersons is icing on the cake, illustrating how these space lizards profess to be on the side of the Black Man but actually are only using him to stick it to the WASPs who wouldn’t let granddad into the country club.
The Jeffersons was actually pretty funny, at least Sherman Helmsley was. Fun Fact: Roxie Roker had her own, real life “zebra,” being married to Jew TV “producer” Sy Kravitz and birthing Lennty Kravitz (who ripped off Jimi Hendrix’s act).
“Progress” has made Lear look tame by the modern standard.
Aren’t there many positive things about George Jefferson? A family man whose success is based on hard work? He competed with the Asian dry cleaners instead of shooting them up or aiming for the exciting life of an aspiring rapper. He sparred with Archie directly rather than go on about microaggressions (despite the ‘fixed fight’ nature of the dialoge). His archetype is no doubt as popular among Blacks as is Clarence Thomas.
Interesting that Esther Rolle was from an immigrant black family, that kind that gets into Harvard to meet their numbers instead of the descendants from slavery blacks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjAtpPilTgk
What an exemplar of his race, the subversive PoS.
I didn’t realize that he was responsible for Fernwood 2 Night and America 2-Night. I really liked those shows.
It’s interesting to note the chirality of “anti-Semitic” (nice use of quotations) gentile critiques of Jewish power and influence a la Coughlin and the Jewish critique of gentile power a la the shows mentioned in the article particularly All in the Family. Of course, it is not a perfect chirality. If you had a white male at a university trying to poopoo white privilege as an anti-white conspiracy theory he would be laughed at. “Anti-white” does not have the same ring to it that “anti-Semitic” has.
It seems also that Lear largely plagiarized British sitcoms. It begs the question, were the British originals also subversive of white British culture as Lear’s versions were to white American culture?
Lear lifted “his” ideas from all over. His organization robbed Redd Foxx not only of his life savings and his original skits, but also nabbed the copyright to his act. “I can’t even use my own name!” Foxx hollered after his bankruptcy proceedings were over.
In reply to Josephus Cato: the ripped-off British comedy shows: Steptoe and Son (written by comedy writing duo Galten and Simpson), and: Till Death Do Us Part (written by Johnny Speight), were, on the whole, pure comedy genius. The Alf Garnett character in TDDUP, who often referred to blacks as “coons”; had a picture of Churchill on the wall. He would lambast his daughter’s boyfriend, the Tony Booth character, who was a Labour Party supporter, as: You Scouse git! Speight, wrote the Alf Garnett part as a White working-class, reactionary, right-wing Tory absurdity. But to the average, especially White working-class, Cockney Londoner, Alf spoke the bleeding truth. So, it sort of backfired. It’s also alleged, that Speight based his Alf Garnett character on the late Derek Day; local Hoxton resident, and vocal spokesman for the Hackney branch of the National Front, who terrified the political opposition, namely the local SWP (Socialist Workers’ Party).
A lot of TV “westerns” were also pushing anti-white messages, even from the 50’s onwards. Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and Rawhide, among others, include many such episodes. They often include a “fair-minded” white who helps make everything OK for the Indians or Buffalo Soldiers, and puts the badwhites to shame.
Lear and others like Fred Silverman were more blatant, and as Jim’s essay suggests, lots of whites uncomplainingly soaked it all in.
Sanford and Son had one of the great lines when Fred was in traffic court and said “Look around here, there’s enough niggas in here to make a Tarzan movie.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HQiqvwQ5Xk
Fun fact about Till Death Do Us Part – Mike (the son in law) was played by Tony Booth, father of Cherie Booth, AKA Cherie Blair as in PM Tony Blair. In turn I’ve heard it mentioned that they are directly descended from John Wilks Booth.
I can’t believe my eyes.
This is the first time I’ve ever read an article that does all of the following three things:
1. Mentions Bea Arthur
2. Mocks ugly women
3. Doesn’t make a comment about Bea Arthur being an ugly woman
Bea Arthur looked (and talked and walked) like one of those postmodern trannies who likes to screech at convenience-store clerks about mis-gendering. Her shtick (pardon the Yiddish)–that sarcastic one-note delivery–was shockingly unfunny.
A classic performance here:
https://youtu.be/LYHSapFnonc?si=HFnuzFedcFSgA3JV&t=4899
I’m tempted to review the entire Star Wars Holiday Special, though I fear that it might not be relevant enough.
Norman Lear was exactly the sort of jew worm that ate out the vine of ZOGling whiggerdumb that fed the jew system. Now that whiggers are degenerate they won’t be able to fight the enemies of the jews, such as the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Muzzies, who are no longer overawed by ZOG and whigger ZOGlings.
Hail Victory !!!
Pastor Martin Lindstedt
Church of Jesus Christ Christian/Aryan Nations of Missouri
https://odysee.com/@PastorLindstedt:f/
Ding dong the witch is dead, lalala!
Glad the scumbag at least lived long enough to see the beginnings of the fruits of his and his co-ethnics labors in the west coming back to bite them on the ass as they have over the last two and a bit months – hopefully he noticed before departing this mortal coil.
If the right director and producer were involved, the story of Georgi Tenno from Gulag Archipelago would be the next Braveheart.
Pardon me, this was meant for the Solzhenitsyn article. How embarrassing.
Happy to see that somebody remember the legendary and brave Georg Tenno!
https://redice.tv/red-ice-tv/educating-your-children-in-the-era-of-antiwhite-indoctrination-and-lies
This is a great interview, highly shareable.
A great organization to get involved with. There is a lot of work to do here, and it is amongst if not the most important task in preserving all we have including ourselves and our future. Glad to see this is getting some play in our sphere.
Have things just balanced out in an ironic way?
Norman Lear’s subversion was influenced by Father Coughlin’s work. And now the fruits and nuts resulting from Lear’s metapolitics are coming home to roost in this barnyard we call life. The hordes that were allowed into the gate through the permissiveness Lear unleashed are trending anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic.
Maybe it all does works out in the end, sometimes.
Their Golem is turning on them just as foretold and it’s glorious to watch….
The tone of this piece is rather different from many of your other essays. It succeeds quite well; in fact, I think it’s terrific.
“Norman Lear — who probably influenced American culture more than any other single figure in the 1970s…”
So if Lear was bigger than the Beatles, and the Beatles were bigger than Jesus… oh my!
More seriously, this was a fitting obituary to a notorious culture distorter. It’s hard to estimate the effect that years of regular exposure to his propaganda had on 200 million TV addicts.
Paul McCartney announced he was leaving The Beatles in April 1970, and their last album, Let it Be, was released a month later. In the 1970s, we were left to be tortured with their solo records.
Another figure who had massive influence throughout the 1960s and 1970s was Muhammad Ali, who formally changed his name from Cassius Clay in 1964 after winning the heavyweight championship from Sonny Liston. From memory, he was the first “mouthy Negro” to not be canceled under the Old Cancellation Regime. His public conversion to the Nation of Islam—not just Islam, but the openly anti-white Nation of Islam—was a huge slap in the face to white America. It also started a trend of other athletes converting to Islam such as NBA star Lew Alcindor, who changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1971. At least Alcindor clarified he wasn’t converting to the Malcolm X/Farrakhan strain of Islam.
I liked this essay, and was very well-documented in recalling the effects of Norman Lear. having grew up and watched these shows (Some of them. When I was in the army, not much TV watching, esp. overseas), I can see how they were actually well-made propaganda, but even then, you could catch the drift. My mother loved “Archie Bunker,” and it was, as Gore Vidal said, the true success of satire is it skins the audience alive while they don’t know it. I never watched the black shows much because they were…well, black. And the lead on Jeffersons was too freaking obnoxious. I did love Sanford and Son. It was funny and I didn’t see much propaganda, just funny characters. Fred Sanford even said something nice about Hitler. Favorite saying of Fred: “beauty may be skin-deep, but ugly is to the bone.”
I didn’t see any real attacks on whites, and Fred’s people were too caught up in their own world to wander into whitey’s, where Jefferson’s was obviously taking on whites.
In West Germany there was a show, Onkel Albert, a kind of All in the Family version, with Albert narrow-minded, still calling East Germany “the Soviet Zone”, and etc.
The essay made a good point bout Father Coughlin. Boy, the Jews never forget, do they?
One correction I would make is on Amos n Andy. I watched the show as a kid, and there was no real “pickaninny” caricatures. it was a comedy, but I didn’t see Kingfish, Andy, etc., as stupid blacks (or Negros, as we said then). They weren’t much different then the blue collar humor of, ay, the Honeymooner or The Life of Riley. If Kingfish was devious and double-dealing, well, look at things today.
And if Andy was a woman chaser, again…but he was a decent guy. I also liked Amos. He was always a level-headed, thoughtful man who usually got the previous two out of scrapes, and I liked him. Also, it was nice to see blacks as policemen, judges, clerks, businessmen, etc. If Sapphire and Momma were loud-mouthed shrews, so were many women in 50’s TV (and in real life). I thought the acting was good, and if the Jews went after Father Coughlin, the civil rights groups went crazy over getting Amos n Andy banned and erased from the pubic memory. Completely. I wonder if the Jews had a say in that.
I certainly found all of the above characters more likable than many on the Jeffersons and Good Times (“Dy-no-mite!”…a real caricature), and if Fred Sanfordmet the Kingfish, he’d look up and say “Elizabeth, one just came through the door…the pigeon express.”
A lot of fun to read.
I agree with your take on Amos & Andy. As kid I only watched a few episodes, but I agree that it was nice to see blacks as police, judge, business men, etc. Overall it portrayed blacks much more favorably than The Three Stooges (my favorite show) portrayed white people. Does anyone think The Three Stooges or the Life of Riley, or The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis showed white people in an especially positive light?
As for the other shows, (Archie Bunker, etc., ) I never watched any of them. I saw a few moments of Bunker, channel surfing, but I didn’t find it funny or entertaining. How out of touch was I? And that was before I became a racist.
John Amos, the father character in the sitcom “Good Times” certainly didn’t have a high opinion of Norman Lear. Lear ended up firing him because he criticized the scripts.
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