Opinion: My last conversation with Norman Lear is one I’ll never forget

Editor’s Note: Bill Carter covered the media business for more than 25 years at The New York Times. He has also been a contributor to CNN, and the author of four books about television, including “The Late Shift.” He was the Emmy-nominated writer of the HBO film adaptation of that book. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

I last saw Norman Lear in February of 2020, when I was part of the team producing the documentary series, “History of the Sitcom,” for CNN.

How could we have done that history justice without hearing from arguably its most prolific, successful and impactful practitioner?

Norman was 98 years old at the time. The shoot was set up at his office in the Culver City section of Los Angeles. Norman, who had a staff of development executives working for him, remained a busy producer, almost half a century past the era that made him a legend — the era of “The Jeffersons,” “Good Times,” “Maude,” “Sanford and Son,” and the seminal comedy that started it all, and changed the television medium forever, “All in the Family.”

I had spoken with Norman many times before, going back to the 1980s, and he was, in all of those conversations, insightful, articulate and full of anecdotal details from his career. In 2015, I moderated an event with him at the Museum of the Moving Image (appropriately located in Queens, New York, home of his most famous character, Archie Bunker). I asked him about the backstory behind the creation of “All in the Family,” some of which was familiar to me:

The two early pilots were rejected by ABC. Norman’s perception was that the flaw in the pilot was the casting of the younger couple, Gloria and Mike, and the show finally met his expectations when Sally Struthers and Rob Reiner joined the cast. However, he never considered altering the stars, Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton, nor even a single line of the startlingly offensive (for that time) dialogue, despite pressure from the show’s new network, CBS.

But he did surprise me that day by saying that he had first tried to convince Mickey Rooney to play Archie, only to have that star from Hollywood’s golden age recoil at the names Archie was calling people — he tossed around words that were commonly used to refer to people of other races, but which now are considered repulsive slurs.

Norman remembered every detail, even the name of Rooney’s agent.

For the doc-series interview, I thought I should research deeper, and dig into Lear’s personal history. From that research, I learned he had served in the Army Air Corps in Italy during WWII. When I asked him about that, he described flying 57 missions (a staggering number) as a radio operator on a B-17.

That hit home. “My Dad was a radio operator,” I told him. Dad flew 33 missions from his base in England; but the job — learn Morse code, deliver regular position reports, fire a .50 caliber machine gun when under attack — was the same in either theater of war, as was the frequently intense combat.

Hearing about my Dad changed the look in Norman’s eyes, as though his recollection was being pulled much further back into the past. He started to tell war stories, including one particular story of how a mission kept getting delayed by weather, until his crew was finally told to shut it down for the day. But the B-17 was able to take off — only to be shot down, with his best Army friend onboard, who was killed in action. This had happened more than three-quarters of a century earlier, but the loss of his friend filled his eyes with tears. Mine too.

It struck me that the reason Lear’s best comedies were such massive hits came down to an accumulation of factors, from timing to casting to his crucial grasping that America was ready for TV comedy that wasn’t based on Mom burning the roast.

But the other essential was Lear’s understanding of the human condition.

Norman always said that Archie contained elements of his own father: the exaggerated gruffness, the grievance psyche, the casual delivery of racial and ethnic slurs.

But he argued that almost everybody had an Archie in their lives, and you couldn’t just dismiss them as narrow-minded bigots; their families still loved them, as America came to love Archie — much to the distress of social scientists of that era.

I connected with that too. I grew up in the borough next to Queens, Brooklyn, and the generation above me shared much with Archie Bunker. In the New York of that era, neighborhoods were bastions of tribalism: The Irish didn’t mix with the Italians who didn’t mix with the Jews. And none of them mixed with the Blacks or Hispanics.

Denigration was a given. Outsiders were unworthy.

My tribe was Irish. From my earliest years I heard my uncles drop slurs without thinking much about them. One uncle never missed “All in the Family.” His Irish tribal blood ran thick, and Archie (played by an actor named O’Connor) was instantly recognizable. The conventional ethnic insults passed my uncle’s lips regularly. But he had fought too, in North Africa and Sicily. And I knew he had a soft heart. He wasn’t filled with venom; just the residue of ancient prejudices.

Lear, a classic Hollywood liberal, who even started up his own organization to advance progressive causes, was able to infuse bigoted Archie with enough identifiable human qualities and frailties that a viewer never doubted his counter-culture-warrior son-in-law, as well as his long-suffering but devoted wife, would embrace him in any time of trouble.

As I would have my Irish uncle.

One aspect of Lear’s genius often gets overlooked. He was surely shaking up the nation’s social consciousness, arguing, more theatrically than Lincoln, for a return to the better angels of our nature.

But 40 million people weren’t tuning in each week for sermons on tolerance and acceptance. Norman Lear’s great accomplishment was putting all our ugly biases on display and making us laugh at them. Hard.

And showing us how embarrassing and silly they are.

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