The legendary television producer has built his career and politics on a lifelong, compassionate desire to understand what other people's lives are like.
"I'm not going to wake up in the morning and get old," Norman Lear, a television producer, said in a 2017 interview. （robert trachtenberg/trunk archive）
The older he gets, the more Norman Lear becomes a symbol he never agreed to become, but that wasn't until he died Tuesday at the age of 101: infinitely thoughtful, creative, intelligent and outspoken, the oldest ideal American citizen, always open to what's next, what's happening, what's now.
I'm not going to wake up in the morning and get old," Lear told me in an interview he wrote with him for The Washington Post in October 2017. "I woke up and wanted to do what was in my mind when I fell asleep last night. ”
At that time, he was 95 years old. He had gone out very late the night before to see Dave Chappelle and others at a comedy club. He said that when he turned 90, he noticed that people applauded his presence as a person, regardless of the occasion or the job at hand. He's still learning Xi keeping it close to — the loved, humorous old man in his trademark white boatman's hat. Walk into any room and they stand up and smile at you.
His advanced age has become a part of history that has had an impact on television and cultural life, and is still a part of history: he has finished work on the second (and final season) season of Netflix's One Day at a Time, a funny and very modern reboot of one of his 1970s sitcom classics. That afternoon, he'd get a producer's ** about a series he was eager to make about getting older, tentatively titled Guess Who's Dead?
A few years later, ABC and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel ventured into a completely unnecessary but fascinating irresistible experiment: a live re-enactment of Lear's sitcom ("Family Guy," "The Jeffersons") memorable episodes during the ** time slot, with Lear himself taking center stage in the show's studio audience. Applause again, because still here, it's still Norman Lear.
It's funny, but there's also some subconscious longing for the whole affair, and some mutually acknowledging Lear's sitcom style—unabashedly topical, emotionally raw, empathetic yet hilarious, filmed with multiple cameras in front of a studio audience—has become a revered artifact. The new "One Day at Time" received rave reviews, but lived a short life entirely under the cancellation of the axe. Archie Bunker, Maud Findlay, George Jefferson. The actors who originally played them were all dead at the time. It's hard to wonder how Lear really feels about this vintage reverence.
Producer Norman Lear (center, wearing a white hat) joined the cast of the CBS television series The Jeffersons in 1983. （cbs photo archive/getty images）
He was sentimental (about his childhood, about his World War II service, about his country, about his children), but not overly nostalgic. He loves the moment, and all the problems that come with it. He's spent his whole life in the present (TV moments, political moments, cultural moments) that it's hard to think he's really gone. Few of us will enter old age like he did, but we seem to believe that this is universally possible, in large part because of our fair share of celebrities, including television pioneers (Lear, Betty White, Carl Reiner, Bob Newhart, Mel Brooks, Dick Van Dyck, etc.), that make it seem so easy.
This is not the case. The health industry, the AARP, and many others have tried to peddle us the best of the wonderful old age dreams – despite TikTok's recent flood of 30-something millennials complaining of back pain. Imagine that. Lear proves that anyone needs a glamorous life, both charismatic and accomplished, and when it comes to aging, his response to aging fits perfectly with what his TV shows have always taught us: life isn't easy. Life is not fair. But how people live is fascinating, and perhaps the secret is to maintain a deep curiosity about how other people's lives work.
In his memoirs and interviews, Lear talks about his experiences as a boy in New York, and while riding the elevated subway, he wondered what was happening in every apartment and house the train passed by: what to eat for dinner?What are they talking about?Early television attempts to answer this question were too sweet, orderly, and white.
Lear and his collaborators propose that etiquette within the American family can be boisterous and rude, rife with disagreements on almost any issue (politics, class, race, gender, religion, sex, money – big shots), and entangled in personal biases and trauma from the human condition. Love can and should exist there, and all of that can also be comical in perfect comedic timing. The only way to learn about the lives of these imaginary others is to eavesdrop through the fourth wall and accept them as they are until their reactions and actions fit into a formula suitable for 22-minute television.
On this side of the fourth wall, we don't have to end our personal crises in half an hour, at least with the illusion that our lives are not going according to the formula (when they often do). Watching those sitcoms, America became like Lear on those trains — desperate to see in, and in doing so, millions of people experienced an electronic solidarity.
Another word is empathy. Another thing that was very important to Lear was that in World War II, he opened the hatch of a B-17 and watched the bombs fall on the town below, which was also crowded with eating houses, and also had conversations, also full of stories he longed to know.
Empathy is the norm in Lear's work and public life, and as the founder of The American Way, it's clear that the principles and opinions in his television show are possible to reason with a bigot like Archie BunkerWhat is life like for a self-made black businessman who moves with his family to a luxury apartment in the sky?What options does Maud have during an unwanted pregnancy?Applicable to the political and social spheres: What if our decisions were based on accepting and bridging our differences?What if we could connect authentically and honestly instead of attracting ourselves to niche audiences and markets?
Norman Lear accepted the Special Award for Best Comedy at the 25th Annual Critics' Choice Awards in 2020. （emma mcintyre/getty images）
By 2017, Lear had experienced the courage to see Americans brutally ignore each other's experiences, backgrounds, and beliefs in the midst of a wave of populist politics. Television itself has also fallen into the fragmentation process of its own streaming** service, offering hundreds of new TV comedies and dramas, which has a way of disrupting the public experience. As a result, Kimmel would love to remake an old-fashioned sitcom broadcast, even if it's just for a night or two.
Lear and I talked about his nightly ** sleep Xi, looked at the entire MSNBC lineup, and watched the new anger coming from Donald Trump's Washington.
I asked Lear if sometimes this is too much for a non-geriatricistWhether he was jealous of many of his friends and loved ones who had passed away and therefore survived, some nights after Rachel Maddow's overabundance, he began to look like the end of everything decent, constitutional and liberal – something he held dear.
I absentmindedly put my hands to my mouth and listened to his answer. He smiled. Why would anyone want to go out?
I'm more inclined to think of a miracle or acceptance as a miracle where you just put your hands up and put your fingers near your lips," he said. It took you every second--- a second of your life to do that, and a few more seconds to listen to me, and it took me every second of my life, 95 years, months, weeks, hours, days to say what I'm saying now, and shake my head again. So, does that illustrate the importance of the moment and the present?We live in a world where everybody, billions of people live, so we can sit here and have this conversation.
That moment fades away from my past and his past, but the lesson is clear – Norman Lear doesn't plan to go anywhere anytime soon, and he left me with his best advice: stick with it, see how the show ends, and never stop being curious about the world around you and how the human characters in it feel and interact.
Human Health Behavior Awards