10 Best Norman Lear Shows, Ranked

Though largely forgotten, this sharp political satire set in the household of U.S. Senator William Powers (a post-Dynasty John Forsyth) is notable for its ensemble cast of future A-listers, including Holland Taylor as the senator’s socially ambitious shark of a wife, David Hyde Pierce as their quietly suicidal congressman son-in-law and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as their wise-beyond-his years son.

Not a hands-on Norman Lear show, this coming-of-age sitcom was one of the most successful projects from his production company, starring Charlotte Rae as Mrs. Edna Garrett, housemother to a memorably diverse ensemble of private-school students played by Kim Fields, Lisa Whelchel, Mindy Cohn and Nancy McKeon. Late in the run, George Clooney joined the show as a hunky carpenter who helped rebuild Mrs. Garrett’s gourmet food store after it burned down.

The 1970s hit One Day at a Time was reimagined more than 30 years later as a vibrant celebration of a Cuban-American family, led by the dynamic Justina Machado as Penelope Alvarez, a former Army nurse dealing with PTSD issues while raising her son and daughter (whose love interest was non-binary). Stealing the show: the great Rita Moreno as her flamboyant mother, Lydia.

To show how far TV had come during Norman Lear’s reign in the 1970s, remember that Mary Tyler Moore was discouraged from making her character of Mary Richards a divorcee when developing The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Five years later, fiercely independent Ann Romano (Bonnie Franklin) was introduced at the moment she was restarting her life as a divorced mom of two teenage daughters (Mackenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli), raising her family in an apartment building in Indianapolis. Once again, the Lear formula of tackling real-world issues, this time with a feminist bent, resonated with viewers.

Lear provided a window to another world rarely seen on TV, a family living in public housing on Chicago’s South Side, in a lively spinoff of Maude (itself a spinoff of All in the Family). The proud and hard-working Evans family struggled to make ends meet, but there was joy, exuberance, and love in the household run by Florida (Esther Rolle), formerly Maude’s maid, and blue-collar dad James (John Amos)—although both stars became annoyed when Jimmie Walker, as their “dy-no-mite” son J.J., began upstaging them and becoming the show’s breakout star.

There went the neighborhood when George and Louise Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley and Isabel Sanford) left their neighbors, the Bunkers of All in the Family, behind in Queens and “moved on up” to Manhattan for a show of their own. A rare-for-its-time depiction of a prosperous Black family, the long-running The Jeffersons mined barbed, topical humor in George’s boorish bravado, especially as it concerned the interracial couple next door (whose daughter would eventually marry the Jeffersons’ son Lionel).

As Fred Sanford, a cantankerous junk dealer living with his more enlightened son (Demond Wilson), Redd Foxx embodied the flip side of Archie Bunker: a Black man equally unafraid to unleash his foolish prejudices on anyone who’d listen. Any time he was challenged or threatened, he’d fake a heart attack and announce to his late wife, “Elizabeth, I’m coming.” We knew better.

Having upended the sitcom, Lear turned his focus to another TV staple—the melodramatic soap opera—with the surreal Mary Hartman, which aired in syndication after the networks deemed it too uncommercial. (Its relatively brief run suggests they were right.) Louise Lasser played the neurotic housewife Mary in a send-up of consumerism and domestic discontent that eventually landed her in a psychiatric ward after a nervous breakdown on live TV. The show’s outrageousness masked a trenchant satire of a nation in turmoil.

Lear’s empire grew with spinoffs of All in the Family, none as controversial as Maude, starring stage veteran Bea Arthur (pre-Golden Girls) as Edith Bunker’s “uncompromising, enterprising, anything but tranquilizing” outspoken cousin Maude Findlay, who was as far to the left politically as Archie was to the right. Over the seasons, Maude went through menopause, had a facelift—and in a polarizing two-part episode, had an abortion when she became pregnant at 47.

TV was never the same after audiences met Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) and his contentious clan in Queens. A blustery working-class bigot who wrangled constantly with his liberal “meathead” son-in-law, Archie’s world had never been seen on TV. It struck a nerve, and despite controversy and network skittishness—ABC turned it down before CBS took a chance on the show—Family became a resounding hit. Lear wrote: “People still say to me, ‘We watched Archie as a family and I’ll never forget the discussions we had after the show.’ And so that was the ripple of All in the Family. Families talked.”