'All in the Family' creator Norman Lear dies at 101

Norman Lear, the writer, director and producer who revolutionized prime time television with such topical hits as “All in the Family” and “Maude” and propelled political and social turmoil into the once-insulated world of sitcoms, has died. He was 101.

Lear died Tuesday night in his sleep, surrounded by family at his home in Los Angeles, said Lara Bergthold, a spokesperson for his family.

Lear fashioned bold and controversial comedies that were embraced by TV sitcom viewers who long had to watch the evening news to find out what was going on in the world. His shows helped define prime time comedy in the 1970s and after, launched the careers of such young performers as Rob Reiner and Valerie Bertinelli and made Carroll O’Connor, Bea Arthur and Redd Foxx among others into middle-aged superstars.

His signature production was “All in the Family,” which was immersed in the headlines of the day, while also drawing upon Lear’s childhood memories of his tempestuous father. Racism, feminism, and the Vietnam War were flashpoints in the sitcom featuring blue collar conservative Archie Bunker, played by O’Connor, and liberal son-in-law Mike Stivic (Reiner). Jean Stapleton co-starred as Archie’s befuddled, but good-hearted wife, Edith, and Sally Struthers played the Bunkers’ daughter, Gloria, who often clashed with Archie on behalf of her husband.

At the start of the 1970s, top-rated shows still included such old-fashioned programs as “Here’s Lucy,” “Ironside” and “Gunsmoke,” although the industry was beginning to change. CBS, Lear’s primary network, would soon enact its “rural purge” and cancel such standbys as “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Green Acres.” The groundbreaking sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” about a single career woman in Minneapolis, debuted on CBS in Sept. 1970, just months before “All in the Family” started.

By the end of 1971, “All In the Family” was No. 1 in the ratings and Archie Bunker was a pop culture fixture, with President Richard Nixon among his fans. Some of his putdowns became catchphrases, whether calling his son-in-law “Meathead,” or his wife “Dingbat.” He would also snap at anyone who dared occupy his faded orange-yellow wing chair, the centerpiece of the Bunker home in the New York City borough of Queens and eventually an artifact in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

In 1984, he was lauded as the “innovative writer who brought realism to television” when he became one of the first seven people inducted into the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame. He later received a National Medal of Arts and was honored at the Kennedy Center. In 2020, he won an Emmy as executive producer of “Live In Front of a Studio Audience: ‘All In the Family’ and ‘Good Times’.’”

Lear was born in New Haven, Conn. on July 27, 1922, to Herman Lear, a securities broker who for a time went to prison for selling fake bonds, and Jeanette, a homemaker who helped inspire Edith Bunker. Norman Lear would remember family life as a kind of sitcom, full of quirks and grudges, “a group of people living at the ends of their nerves and the tops of their lungs,” he explained during a 2004 appearance at the John F. Kennedy Presidential LIbrary in Boston.