Norman Lear, a genius producer and screenwriter, passed away on Tuesday in Los Angeles at the age of 101. "Lear's hit comedy shows changed television forever, " said Darnel Hunt, a leading artist on TV.
Lear grew up in an ordinary family in Connecticut, where an unexpected accident brought about his father's business collapse. So he had to drop out of college and joined the army. In his late 20s, he moved to Los Angeles where he struggled hard for several years, selling furniture door to door. Later on, unsatisfied with his life, he eventually turned to writing for a nightclub comedy act.
By 1971, when he was almost 50, Lear had produced and directed some shows, among which was the hit show All in the Family. In the beginning, it didn't get on the air smoothly. However, once it did, this show made it to the top-10 for eight of its nine seasons, promising Lear's life was to change.
This successful show was just the beginning of Lear's dominating position in comedy shows. Then came The Jeffersons, about a family on its way up. It ran for eleven seasons, one of the longest running comedy shows on television, becoming another successful story. When interviewed about the hit of his shows, Lear said, "Our team read two or three newspapers a day, paid a lot of attention to our families, and came in to talk about everything that was affecting us in our daily lives. " Therefore, it came as no surprise that viewers had a sense of Lear's own family after watching All in the Family.
"Routinely, Lear's shows might get fifty or sixty million viewers. He was in direct contact with the living rooms and families of the country, " says Marty Kaplan, founding director of the Norman Lear Center. "Lear did everything with humor and sympathy, "