Norman Lear

Lear was an Army radio operator before he was a comedy writer, and he came into television the slow way: a press agent job he did not like, then writing for a CBS sitcom in the mid-fifties, then producing a variety show. His first series as a creator was The Deputy in 1959, a western built around Henry Fonda. At the halfway point of his life, in other words, his career looked completely ordinary.

Then All in the Family arrived in 1971 and the American sitcom stopped being a place where nothing was at stake. His method was not to add issues to comedy but to make the argument itself the plot: an episode is two people who cannot agree, in one room, with a live audience listening and reacting. Archie Bunker was written as a bigot who was also funny, warm and wrong, and the discomfort was the entire point. The spin-offs came fast. Maude, The Jeffersons, Good Times and Sanford and Son each handed a different American household the same format and let the disagreements change accordingly. His Emmy came for comedy writing rather than for producing, which is the correct read on him.

He got stranger as he got more powerful. Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was a soap-opera parody sold into late-night syndication when the networks would not take it, and Fernwood 2 Night was a chat show for a town that did not exist. Away from the studio he founded People for the American Way in 1981 and spent decades on First Amendment politics. He stayed public to the end, hosting the Live in Front of a Studio Audience specials that restaged his own scripts with new casts, and he died in 2023.