How to Listen Like Norman Lear

The late TV legend on fathers, bigots, and never giving up hope.

Norman Lear (left) with Carroll O'Connor.

Norman Lear, may he rest in peace, had iron fucking balls.

It’s easy to forget just how risky All In the Family was when it premiered in the early 1970s. Lear’s first network sitcom as producer and writer lovingly depicted a racist—an actual racist, who used words like spades, spooks, chinks, and coons with impunity—and invariably gave him the last word even when he was jaw-droppingly wrong. It made audiences uncomfortable on both the right and left.

“I don't think you can be a Black‐baiter and lovable, nor an anti‐Semite and lovable,” author Laura Z. Hobson wrote about the series in the New York Times. “And don’t think the millions who watch this show should be conned into thinking that you can be.” (Lear responded: “In what vacuum did you grow up? Not a father, brother, uncle, aunt, friend or neighbor who was both lovable and bigoted?”) President Nixon once complained to his chief of staff (in a conversation captured on tape) that All In the Family was created by “left-wingers… trying to destroy us.” And TV evangelist Jerry Falwell was convinced that Lear was the “greatest threat to the American family in our generation.”

Lear went on to develop and produce Good Times, the first U.S. sitcom with a two-parent Black family, and other shows that tackled social issues most TV series went out of their way to avoid, like homosexuality, women’s rights, and abortion. Lear’s fictional Maude had an abortion in late 1972, a full two months before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision.

Lear died last week, at the near-Biblical age of 101. Up until the end, Lear was writing and working, plotting new shows and reboots, without any thoughts of retirement or even a day off to rest. We should all be so lucky.

Weirdly (at least for me), Lear died on the very same day that my dad did, several decades earlier. My dad loved Lear’s shows. But Lear also had almost twice as much time on this planet as he did. And I’m sure that pissed off Dad. If they run into each other in heaven, I bet it’ll be super awkward.

I spoke with Lear back in 2016, for an ICON interview for Men’s Health magazine. It was a few months before Trump won the presidency, and many of us were just learning (or being reminded) how many of our friends and relatives had some very ugly beliefs that were just waiting for the right encouragement to come bubbling to the surface. I wasn’t feeling especially optimistic about human beings in general. But talking to Lear was like a tonic.

We talked about complicated fathers, why you’ll never change a bigot’s mind, and how to survive the Archie Bunkers of the world. But he did it in a way that was unlike any conversation I was having with my “left-winger” friends at the time. Lear listened intently and took his time answering, and was always hopeful. When I remarked on how happy he seemed, he laughed and said, “If I had a complaint about my life, I’d be an ingrate.”

Our interview was published in the magazine but never made it online. I preferred it that way, and I think Lear did too. He asked repeatedly if it’d be in print, “not just on some website.” We talked for a bit about how much we both missed newspapers and magazines and how the ink left on your fingers from a TV script wasn’t all that different from newspaper ink.

“A computer doesn’t leave anything on your fingers,” he told me. “And that just proves how much it doesn’t matter.”

With apologies to Mr. Lear, our full conversation has found a second life, for lack of any better options, on a medium that doesn’t matter.