While much of television's history is filled with banality, writer/producer Norman Lear (born 1922) is credited with enlarging the scope of the medium. With such groundbreaking television series as All in the Family, Maude, and Sanford and Son to his...

Perhaps the most significant of several producers who reshaped American television in the 1970s, Norman Lear brought his particular genius to the situation comedy genre. Infusing sitcom content with social commentary and earthy language while also...

Norman Milton Lear (born July 27 1922 in New Haven, Connecticut) is an American television writer and producer who produced such popular sitcoms as All in the Family, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, Good Times and...

The creator of what has been called perhaps the single most influential program in the history of broadcasting is back. Producer Norman Lear, a co-creator of "All in the Family," returns to series television at 8 tonight with a new half-hour series, "Sunday Dinner."...

NEW YORK -- For some producers, a new series isn't quite like a second marriage, the triumph of hope over experience. Consider Norman Lear. In the '70s, he came forth with such network hits as "All in the Family" and "Maude," hailed then...

The TV comedy "Ugly Betty" and the film "Pan's Labyrinth" won top honors Saturday at the 22nd annual Imagen Awards."Babel," the critically praised movie that weaves stories set in Mexico and four other countries, lost in four categories.The Imagen Awards honor contributions by and about...

College brochures tout Ivy-covered campuses, plush dorms and high-tech fitness centers. But when it comes to getting the attention of students _ and rival institutions _ nothing works as well as a little star power.Relatively unknown schools like Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., experienced a...

I accuse Lear of being a closet scholar. Like most creators with the broad touch necessary for quality-cum-success, he seems sure enough of his own originality not to hesitate to steal from past masters. His earlier shows, still running, reflect this. The Jeffersons's black bourgeois dry cleaner … is "movin' on up" so nearly in the footsteps of Molière's Monsieur Jourdain, that it is hard to believe that Lear has not been rereading the Bourgeois Gentilhomme. ...

[The] fact that Norman Lear's "All That Glitters" didn't strike gold doesn't mean that it didn't have importance for our culture. It did…. The first hour shown to the press had all the marks of high ideology. "All That Glitters" coruscated like a tract. Women in power, men subservient—the script seemed catechetical. Lines and scenes reached out to nudge the audience: "Get it? Get it?" In real life, any man who dared to behav...

Comedy and death are old companions …, not merely in graveyard and funeral jokes, but in substance…. Both are forms of criticism and reality, shattering pretense, showing people for what they are. To make a joke of something is to kill it. The terms of comedy are the terms of death: you're a riot, a scream: you break me up; you're killing me. These terms have a special companionship in "All in the Family" because "All in the Family" was dead on arrival...