Here comes an audacious statement. No one has influenced American television more than Norman Lear. Think about it, and you will realize that it is true. Lear transformed a medium that offered us bland, suburban stories into narratives that were simultaneously funny and cutting. The 1970s unfolded through those stories — All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons, Good Times, and Sanford and Son. Lear single-handedly put such issues as race, class, sexuality, and bigotry before the American people. (He also invented the idea of the spin off, which was sort of a midrashic art form, in which a relatively...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
