Burn in HELL!
Who gets his hat?
The Reaper musta got some double points for “harvesting” that one.
And he died with the knowledge people were more sympathetic to the Archie Bunker character as opposed to Meathead, despite Lear presenting Archie as a caricature to be mocked.
As with the “country comedies” of the 60s I think his shows were intended to belittle a subset of the population considered inferior by the “elite” and instead ended up endearing them to the average joe.
The Christmas 1976 episode is not very easy to watch nowadays. On one hand, we can likely sympathize with the friend of Archie’s who lost a son in Vietnam and who was gracious and respectful enough to have Christmas dinner with the friend of Mike’s who dodged the draft. But then there is that other scene in which Mike lectures to Archie about “When the hell are you going to admit that the war was wrong?” and we know that at that time, the unspeakable brutality that took place both in Vietnam under the Hanoi government and Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge largely because the Norman Lears and others forced the Americans out of there.
He knew how to make entertaining TV. I kind of laugh, because he was a die hard leftist, but his two most popular characters: Archie Bunker and George Jefferson were two sides of the same coin—men who loved America and were, if a bit on the buffoonish side, conservative and capitalist.
Archie was a union man but a social conservative who wanted law and order. George was an entrepreneur who climbed the socio-economic ladder through hard work.
Lear’s attempt to make men like him hated didn’t work out. I know he wanted these characters played for laughs—but as a social message Lear was saying to his audience Jefferson and especially Bunker were not to be emulated.
Oh well.
I hope he made peace with his Creator before he died.
A little hotter down there today.
Leftist POS.
Well, I’ll just say RIP. And bury him with that stupid hat.
I believe he founded and led People for the American Way, which was for anything but the American Way.
He made some anti-Trump remark in the past year. I can’t recall what he said but it boiled down to “Trump bad!”. It was a typical liberal virtue signaling critique of Trump, in that it said nothing about anything he actually did as President.
Wondering why all these very wealthy men live to be 90+.
FINALLY
Only the good die young... Lear must have been one hell of an SOB.
Someone put Rob Reiner on Kleenex Watch.
‘only the good die young’