Arts & Entertainment

Norman Lear’s Truth

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If you know a thing about the history of television, you know that Norman Lear changed it. Beginning in 1971 with All in the Family, and later with The Jeffersons and Maude and Good Times and One Day at a Time and right up into the 2020s, he put households onscreen that looked like actual American families. Just as important, those families talked about the things actual people talked about, fractiously if (usually) lovingly. Lear died yesterday at 101, and Kathryn VanArendonk, who knows quite a lot more about the history of television than most of us, delivered this deep consideration of his place in the culture — a man whose work was unifying even as he fostered examination of our social divisions, and often very funny along the way. “It was a model,” she writes, “for putting an argument, a sustained, angry, deeply felt but respectful fight, at the center of American life.” Ain’t we lucky we had him?

—Christopher Bonanos, city editor, New York

Norman Lear’s Truth He depicted the American experiment, one family at a time.

Photo: David Harry Stewart
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