Norman Lear’s Real Revolution

The death of Norman Lear has prompted the usual glowing tributes, all of them deserved, for one of TV’s great pioneers. All in the Family and its many spinoffs revolutionized television comedy — brought it social relevance; tackled controversial issues, from racism to abortion; gave voice to minority communities that were at the time largely invisible on TV; and captured the kind of massive audiences that are now only a distant memory. 

But let me celebrate one aspect of Lear’s achievement that is too often overlooked. It hit me, like an epiphany, in the very first minute of the first episode of All in the Family that I saw back in 1971.

I was a student at Berkeley, and (along with most college students of that era) watching little television, except when one of our campus protests made the network evening news. But I had been to a screening on campus of some old Sid Caesar TV shows, hosted by Rob Reiner, then known only as the son of Carl Reiner, Caesar’s former second banana. Talking with a few of us after the screening, Reiner touted the new TV sitcom that he was co-starring in, a show none of us had heard of called All in the Family. It was something special, he said, and we should take a look at it. 

So one night I did. As I recall it (a little dimly), the show opened with Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) scuffling into the kitchen in the middle of the night to raid the refrigerator. Silently he takes out a container (of milk? juice? water? Sorry, I’m a little hazy) and pours into his glass. But only a few drops emerge, and he rolls his eyes in dismay; someone has put the bottle back in the refrigerator empty. 

He peers back inside the fridge, and finds another container. He takes it out and again pours. And again, only a few drops — another empty pitcher. Archie explodes in silent exasperation. 

No words. No jokes. No real physical comedy. Just a small, homely vignette from everyday life — something everyone can recognize, relate to, and laugh at.  And sure enough, a studio audience was right there watching, and laughing. 

It’s hard to overstate how radical this was. Family sitcoms of the era were either sugary fantasies, like The Brady Bunch or My Three Sons, or fish-out-of-water farces, like The Beverly Hillbillies. It would never even occur to them to look for the humor in a trivial, mundane detail like getting a drink out of the refrigerator in the middle of the night.

Not that it wouldn’t get laughs. Sitcoms at the time were nearly all shot on film, with the laughter provided afterwards by a laugh track. All in the Family was, in sharp contrast, shot on videotape, in front of a live studio audience. That gave the show more immediacy, more intimacy — and more of a challenge for the writers and actors: they had to make real people laugh.  

All in the Family brought an authenticity to the sitcom that was brand new. Lear talked often about drawing Archie’s character, and his contentious relationship with son-in-law Michael (Reiner), from the conversations he used to have with his own father. The casual bigotry (“You’re the laziest white man I’ve ever seen,” Archie famously quipped to Michael), the testy conversations at the dinner table, the patently sexist and unequal relationship between husband and wife, all had the ring of real experience. 

As the years went on, Lear’s social-political messaging got more strident and self-conscious. But like Ernest Hemingway in the early 1920s, Lear cleaned out all the phoniness and sentimentality of the old guard. He brought TV back to the basics: close observation of the way real people, families, bigoted fathers, actually talk and behave.  He gave TV comedy a bracing dose of truth — one drop at a time.  

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