Norman Lear never was one to be stifled with. When Fred Silverman turned to him for a show to upgrade the image of CBS — the Tiffany network that, through the enormous popularity of The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres and Hee Haw, had come to stand for Country Bumpkins Supreme — Lear knew exactly the path he wanted to take. He would turn the sitcom landscape into a minefield where the timid dare not tread, taking on the Big Issues of the time: The Vietnam War. Civil Rights. Women’s Liberation. Hippie culture. The growing chasm between America’s Haves and Have-Nots. Lear would introduce Archie Bunker into the American cultural pantheon, damn the consequences.
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Not, however, with the wagging finger of the pedant. Lear, who had written comedy with Ed Simmons for Martha Raye, and Jerry Lewis & Dean Martin, produced variety shows and feature films with his Tandem Productions partner Bud Yorkin and hung out with Hollywood’s crack-a-minute cadre of gagmeisters that included Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar and Neil Simon among countless others, was one of the funniest men alive. Is one of the funniest men alive, I hasten to add, for at 92, he has lost none of the inciseveness that scores his wit with rivulates of sass, Yiddishisms and wisdom. His self-deprecating humor springs from every page of Even This I Get To Experience (coming out next week from Penguin), the memoir of a self-made man who, by the end of the 1970s had seven of the top 10 shows on TV, each of them getting laughs while causing recurrent apoplexy, agita and conniptions among the suits in Program Practices.
It never was easy, and in the exclusive excerpt below, Lear recounts the battle to get All In The Family out of his head and onto the air. From the outset he knew two things: that Archie Bunker would epater le bourgeoisie – and that if he yielded on even the smallest point, he stood to lose everything.
Within days of my being asked to sign the three-picture deal with United Artists, Bob Wood, newly ensconced in the offices at CBS Television City in Los Angeles, phoned me to say he’d just seen the “Archie pilot” and would I be interested in talking about it going on CBS? Although it would mean I couldn’t take the picture deal, I couldn’t resist meeting with him after two pilots and more than two years of thinking about it. Wood, an able and agreeable executive, backed up by his talented and driven programming VP, Fred Silverman, had predetermined that the kind of rural comedies that had sustained CBS — The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction—had seen their day, and he hoped to serve up something to change the CBS brand and mark his regime.